Simon Guest

Current

Senior Director of Technical Strategy at Microsoft Corporation

Past

Senior Director at Microsoft Corporation
Group Program Manager at Microsoft Corporation
Senior Software Engineer at Zoho Corporation

Senior Consultant at Conchango
Systems Analyst at Herbert Smith
Support Analyst at GEC Plessey Semiconductors

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Education

University of Westminster
Plymouth College of Further Education

Recommended

11 people have recommended Simon

Connections

357 connections

Industry

Computer Software

Websites

Simon Guest’s Summary

Simon Guest is the Senior Director of Technical Strategy in the Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) group at Microsoft, responsible for helping developers worldwide deliver practical and elegant solutions using Microsoft technologies.

Since joining Microsoft in 2001, Simon has led the Microsoft Platform Architecture Team, acted as Editor-in-Chief of the Microsoft Architecture Journal, pioneered the area of .NET and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) interoperability, worked with customers on mission critical .NET solutions, and has been a regular speaker at many conferences worldwide, including PDC, TechEd, and JavaOne.

Before joining Microsoft, and with over 18 years in the IT industry, Simon held architect-level positions at many organizations, including Zoho Corporation, a Silicon Valley startup; Conchango, a UK based consultancy; and Herbert Smith, a leading law firm in the UK. He also worked for several years at GEC in its semiconductor manufacturing division.

Simon was born in England, and has been living in the U.S. for approximately eight years. He holds a Masters Degree in IT Security from the University of Westminster, London, and a Higher National Certificate in Software Engineering from Plymouth College. Simon is the author of numerous technical articles and books about Java, Microsoft .NET, and Web technologies, as well as maintaining a blog at http://simonguest.com.

Simon Guest’s Experience

Senior Director of Technical Strategy

Microsoft Corporation

(Public Company; MSFT; Computer Software industry)

January 2009 — Present (11 months)
Senior Director

Microsoft Corporation

(Public Company; MSFT; Computer Software industry)

October 2005 — January 2009 (3 years 4 months)

Led the platform architecture team - a team of architects responsible for delivering guidance, events, and creating a worldwide community for Microsoft’s internal and external IT architect audience. Highlights for the team included early guidance around cloud computing, software factories, and Web 2.0, successful architect tracks at multiple conferences worldwide, launch of the MSDN architecture center on MSDN, and ARCast, an architecture-focused podcast.

Acted as Editor-in-Chief of the Microsoft Architecture Journal (http://www.architecturejournal.net), a quarterly online and printed publication for IT Architects, reaching 70,000 readers in 5 languages.
Group Program Manager

Microsoft Corporation

(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; MSFT; Computer Software industry)

March 2001 — October 2005 (4 years 8 months)

Created and led a team focusing on interoperability between Microsoft .NET and J2EE. Author of the "Microsoft .NET and J2EE Interoperability Toolkit" (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0735619220). In 2005, I was awarded an Excellence Award by Sun Microsystems for my talk on Advanced Web Services Interoperability at JavaOne.

Delivered numerous presentations to customers and executives on the importance of interoperability, including a 30 minute, 1:1 presentation to Bill Gates on competitive application servers.

Pioneered early work in Web Services area, including being awarded a US patent for “Web Services Processing using MAPI compliant mail applications”, and creating a Microsoft WSE compliant custom transport for IBM MQ Series.

Worked on multiple projects with Microsoft customers on achieving interoperability with the Microsoft platform. The ideas and concepts from one of these projects were developed internally and became part of the Microsoft VSTO.
Senior Software Engineer

Zoho Corporation

(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Computer Software industry)

December 2000 — March 2001 (4 months)

Before Zoho Corporation ceased operations in Mar 2001, I reported to the CTO, tasked with designing a secure enterprise directory for several marketplace applications.

Developed a set of LDAP-bound EJB Bean Managed Persisted Components running on BEA WebLogic Server 6.0 and Sun iPlanet Directory Server 5.0.
Senior Consultant

Conchango

(Public Company; 201-500 employees; Computer Software industry)

December 1997 — December 2000 (3 years 1 month)

Consultant to a large financial institution to design a secure, single sign-on authentication infrastructure for the bank's internal Web based applications. This included protocol tunneling of Citrix ICA over HTTPS and delivery of services including application metering and billing. Solution was created jointly with Microsoft Corporation using Windows 2000 and IBM MQ Series.

Worked with a leading UK retailer, to design a secure, resilient infrastructure to host their web site in time for the holiday season. Created a secure environment using Cisco PIX and Checkpoint Firewall-1, handling managed failover, DCOM across multiple interfaces, and audit capabilities.

Onsite consultant for a cable communications company on a multi-site Windows NT and Novell infrastructure. Led a team of 50 managing the rollout, responsible for delivering communications plans to the business, optimization and tuning, and developing a utility for Z.E.N.works, which was later adopted by Novell.
Systems Analyst

Herbert Smith

(Partnership; 1001-5000 employees; Law Practice industry)

August 1996 — December 1997 (1 year 5 months)

Working in the IS department, designed and implemented a site-wide client and server Windows NT rollout based on DEC Alpha technology.

Managed a global rollout of Microsoft Exchange, including a migration from DEC All-in-1 and Microsoft Mail, for the Firm's European and APAC offices.
Support Analyst

GEC Plessey Semiconductors

(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing industry)

September 1991 — August 1996 (5 years )

Development of semiconductor fabrication production interface software for the facility using Borland Delphi.

Migration from IBM LanManager 2.1 on OS/2 to a Windows NT BackOffice environment. Implementation of an SMTP and POP3 mail system on SunOS Solaris.

Simon Guest’s Education

University of Westminster

Masters of Science , IT Security , 1998 — 2000

Attained with Distinction
Plymouth College of Further Education

HNC , Software Engineering , 1994 — 1996

Attained with Distinction

Additional Information

Simon Guest’s Websites:

Simon Guest’s Groups:

IASA (International Association of Software Architects) since 2005,
WWISA (WorldWide Institute of Software Architects) since 2003, BCS (British Computer Society) since 1995