Hi….is this thing on? Hi….I’m Steve

lets dispense with the rambling history of my life and do this in the tried and trusted, 10 things list to help clear the clouds on who I am and why I’m here.

 

  1. Steve Clayton, at Microsoft for 12 years, currently Director of Cloud Strategy in a part of the Microsoft world that we call Microsoft International
  2. I’m sort of a techie. I studied information and computing at Loughborough University a long time ago. I loved the ergonomics course…closest I got to being a designer
  3. I hail originally from Liverpool, England and yes, I’ve lost my Scouse accent. Nothing a few beers can’t resolve but found years on the speaking circuit meant I had to talk slower and with less of a twang to be understood. I think
  4. Prior to Microsoft, I worked at Zeneca (now AstraZeneca) and helped to build a global Intranet back when the word Intranet hadn’t been invented.
  5. At Microsoft I’ve been involved in some way in these products: Internet Explorer, Proxy Server, Tahoe (SharePoint), Stinger (Windows Mobile), Exchange, Windows, BPOS, Azure
  6. I’m addicted (not clinically) to Twitter and helped launch something called the Blue Monster
  7. When not playing with technology, I love football, motorsport, design, architecture, cycling and scuba diving.
  8. I have a blog that I spend way too much time writing. It helps me get stuff out of my brain and I’m a big fan of sharing
  9. My favourite product of the last few years at Microsoft? Live Mesh
  10. I’m here because I spend all of my time working our our cloud technologies at Microsoft – SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Windows Azure Platform etc.

 

let me expand a little on #10 as that’s why I’m really here. I don’t work in the product teams though, I work in a strategy group that helps determine how, when and where we launch these services. It’s a lot of fun and challenging. I get to work with lots of folks in the product teams as we think through what it takes to launch services at scale, how to support them, what the implications are for data centers and much more.

What I hope I can share here are some perspectives from an international point of view around our continuing shift to cloud services.