Speakers

A couple of frequent speakers introduce themselves here. All information you find here is published with the approval of the mentioned speakers.

Nikolai Blackie
Location: Auckland, New Zealand

One of New Zealand’s premier Integration experts, Nikolai is a specialist Integration & Cloud architect with considerable experience across Microsoft BizTalk and Azure Integration solutions. Nikolai is a certified Microsoft VTSP in both BizTalk and Azure, and as such he is regularly engaged by Microsoft to consult with clients on their behalf for these solutions.
As Adaptiv Integration’s Principle architect, Nikolai governs integration strategy, methodology, standards and technical direction for Adaptiv, and works closely with enterprise clients to ensure integration solution designs are fit for purpose.
Nikolai has over a decade of senior Integration experience across industries including power, retail, utilities, food manufacture, construction, transport/distribution, education, and finance. Nikolai also holds significant experience in all aspects of enterprise scale web application and SaaS from design through to load testing.

   

Bill Chesnut (MVP)
Location: Beaconsfield (VIC), Australia

Bill Chesnut is a Principal Consultant for Mexia Consulting, based in Melbourne, Australia. His career started in IT in 1983 with the US Defence Departement as an IBM Systems Programmer. In 1994 he made the switch to the Microsoft Windows platform and he has been involved with Windows development ever since.
Bill, also named as BizTalkBill, has worked on numerous enterprise projects using Microsoft C/C++, Visual Basic and SQL Server. Most recently, he has been driving various application integration projects using VB.NET, ASP.NET, C#, XML, XSLT, SQL Server, Windows Azure and BizTalk Server to connect a variety of Microsoft Business Solutions applications with other systems.
Bill is very involved in the Microsoft User Group Community as a past leader of the Melbourne .Net User Group and a regular participant and occasional speaker at the Melbourne Azure Meet up group. He has also started the Melbourne BizTalk User Group. Microsoft recognized his involvement in the BizTalk community by rewarding him with the MVP title for every year since 2004.

    

 Glenn Colpaert (MVP)
Location: Bruges Area, Belgium

Glenn Colpaert is an Integration Consultant and Microsoft Integration MVP at Codit. He has been integrating businesses with BizTalk & Microsoft technologies for more than 5 years. During these years he was involved in many EAI and B2B projects – both on-premise and hybrid (cloud). He has gained a lot of hand-on experience during his projects and likes to share it with colleagues and the community. Glenn is also part of the Microsoft Azure Insider program as well as the BizTalk Advisors group. He became a board member of BTUG.be, the Belgian BizTalk User Group and is an active blogger on the Codit Blog.

    

 Nino Crudele (MVP)
Location: Bakingstoke, United Kingdom

Nino Crudele has two daughters, one son and a fantastic wife Grazia. In 2014 he moved from Italy to Bakingstoke, England. Nino has been working in the consulting world for almost 20 years. He started as a C developer and later moved to .NET and the Web. He has always been fond of the integration aspects of development. One day back in 2003 he had the opportunity to work with BizTalk. This was one of the first Italian BizTalk pilots using BizTalk 2002.
Currently Nino is a Principal Consultant at Solidsoft Reply, a consultancy company in England. Besides that he is also a Virtual Technology Specialist for BizTalk Server. He enjoys this role as it enables him to work with many different clients seeing BizTalk in different scenario’s from a technical point of view, size, and criticality. Nino has worked with most of the BizTalk accelerators,  Rosettanet, HL7, SWIFT and has done some big projects on EDI  and RFID. In the past he also had the opportunity to be part of a big integration project with a major Italian enterprise organization that integrates many technologies like SAP, AS400, TIBCO and others using BizTalk.

   

 Johan Hedberg (MVP)
Location: Stockholm, Sweden

Johan Hedberg is an integration architect at Enfo Zystems in Stockholm, Sweden, working with BizTalk and other products and technologies in the integration area throughout the ALM cycle. He also speaks, trains and authors in these areas. His latest publication is the co-authored (MCTS): Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 (70-595) Certification Guide. Among some of the currently held abbreviations acquired over the years are MCSD.NET, MCAD, MCPD, MCTS, MCT, MVP and V-TSP. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden, blogs at http://blogical.se/blogs/johan, occasionally tweets through @johed, co-founded and co-runs the Swedish BizTalk User Group http://biztalkusergroup.se.

     

 Saravana Kumar (MVP)
Location: London, United Kingdom

Saravana Kumar is the Founder/CTO of BizTalk360 (http://www.biztalk360.com), a unified tool targeted towards administration, support, operations and monitoring of Microsoft BizTalk Server. He is also a Microsoft MVP for BizTalk Server since 2007. He is an active member in the BizTalk community. He maintains two community websites dedicated for BizTalk Server http://www.biztalk247.com and http://blogdoc.biztalk247.com.

    

 Tord Glad Nordahl
Location: Bergen, Norway

Tord Glad Nordahl is a consultant at Microsoft. He works as an advisor and performs training, health checking, and other administrators tasks at different companies in Norway. He is also a public speaker at different events over the world. Tord has over 6 years of BizTalk experience and is one of the few with an in-depth knowledge of how BizTalk works, and how to improve it by using the best practices. Tord is also a contributor of the biztalkadmin.com blog (http://biztalkadmin.com) and at the Microsoft forums.

   

 Sandro Pereira (MVP)
Location: Porto, Portugal

Sandro Pereira lives in Portugal and works as a BizTalk consultant at DevScope (http://www.devscope.net). In the last few years he has been working on implementing integration scenarios and Cloud Provisioning at a major telecommunications service provider in Portugal. His main focus is on Integration Technologies where he has been using .NET, BizTalk and SOAP/XML/XSLT since 2002.
He is an active blogger, member of BizTalk Brazil Community, member and moderator of MSDN BizTalk Server Forums, Code Gallery contributor and was awarded Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for BizTalk Server by Microsoft since 2011. He has certifications for BizTalk Server 2006 and BizTalk Server 2010.

    

 Richard Seroter (MVP)
Location: Los Angeles, United States

Richard Seroter is a Product Manager for cloud computing provider Tier 3 (http://www.tier3.com), a Microsoft MVP, blogger, author, trainer and frequent public speaker. He has spent the majority of his career working with organizations as they planned and implemented their enterprise software solutions. Richard worked first for two global IT consulting firms where he gained exposed to a diverse range of industries, technologies, and business challenges. Then, Richard joined Microsoft as a SOA/BPM technology specialist where his sole objective was to educate and collaborate with customers as they considered, designed, and built application integration solutions. He then accepted a job at biotechnology leader Amgen where he designed a wide range of global systems before becoming the lead architect of the R&D division. Richard now works at Tier 3 as a Product Manager where he contributes to product strategy and development while actively collaborating with the cloud computing community.
Richard is the author or contributor to three recent books: “Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform” (Packt Publishing, 2010) which discusses where to use which Microsoft platform technology; “SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009″ (Packt Publishing, 2009) which takes a look at how to apply good SOA principles to a wide variety of BizTalk scenarios; “Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration” (Packt Publishing, 2011) in which Richard wrote chapters explaining integration strategies for Windows Azure, Salesforce.com and Dynamics CRM 2011.

    

 Michael Stephenson (MVP)
Location: London, United Kingdom

Michael is an independent integration & cloud specialist based in the UK. He is primarily focused around integration technologies in the Microsoft integration platform such as BizTalk, Windows Azure, and a number of other open source offerings. Michael has many years of technical leadership and coaching experience and has worked with customers to deliver a number of complex real-world hybrid integration solutions connecting business partners and SAAS applications to an organisations on premise line of business systems. Prior to freelancing Michael also held a technical evangelist role with Edenbrook who were a large UK consultancy.
Michael is also heavily involved in community activities such as the UK Connected Systems User Group and blogging. Michael also recently pioneered the BizTalk Maturity Assessment (http://www.biztalkmaturity.com) which is designed to help customers ensure they are doing the right things to deliver successful projects with BizTalk.

     

 Stephen W. Thomas (MVP)
Location: Austin (TX), United States

Stephen started his career with a Chemical Engineering degree from the University of Iowa. After realizing his passion was actually in software, he went to work for a major consulting firm where he worked on his first Microsoft Biztalk 2000 project in early 2001.
Stephen is an independent consultant specializing in BizTalk Server and other Microsoft Server technologies including Workflow and AppFabric. He has been working with BizTalk for over nine years. For the past six years, Stephen has been recognized as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in BizTalk Server.
Stephen has done consulting work for numerous clients including many in the Fortune 500. Stephen runs the BizTalk community site BizTalkGurus(http://www.BizTalkGurus.com). The site offers a community forum, over 50 BizTalk samples, various how-to videos, and Stephen’s blog. Stephen has presented at several Microsoft TechEd events, multiple SOA Conferences, and various user groups.

    

Sam Vanhoutte (MVP)
Location: Bruges Area, Belgium

Sam Vanhoutte is CTO and Product Manager with Codit. Based in Belgium, Sam is a Microsoft BizTalk Virtual Technology Specialist and has extensive experience in building integrated enterprise, ESB and SOA solutions. Because of the specialized focus on integration on Microsoft technology, Sam is part of Microsoft’s Connected Systems and Azure Advisory boards and is a Windows Azure Insider. Sam is also co-founder and member of the board of the Belgian BizTalk User Group, which was founded during the summer of 2013. In 2014 Sam is an Integration MVP since 2014.

While managing and architecting the online integration platform “Codit Integration Cloud”, Sam has been focusing on Cloud integration with the Windows Azure platform the last years, focusing on the Windows Azure Service Bus and BizTalk Services technology.

    

 Kent Weare (MVP)
Location: Calgary, Canada

Born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, Kent Weare developed a love for ice hockey, football and technology. He attended the University of Regina where he obtained a Degree in Computer Science. After completing his undergrad degree, he spent time in India completing a Post Graduate diploma in Object Oriented Technology. He currently lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada but remains a die-hard Saskatchewan Roughrider football fan.

Kent began his career at a small Internet startup before taking on a junior role with the Saskatchewan Government. Since then he has worked on projects for the Canadian Federal Government, a multi-national bank in the United States, Health Care projects in Eastern and Western Canada, and has spent the last six years employed by a large Electricity Distribution company in Calgary. Kent’s current responsibilities involve managing a Microsoft Solutions team that supports BizTalk, Dynamics CRM, SharePoint Server, Project Server and .Net Web Applications.

During Kent’s time at the Federal Government, he had an opportunity to participate in his first BizTalk project. Eight years later he is still “hooked” on BizTalk having worked with every BizTalk version released since. In 2008, Kent was awarded his first Microsoft MVP award for BizTalk Server. He continues to be active in the BizTalk community by maintaining active blogs at http://kentweare.blogspot.com and
http://www.MiddlewareInTheCloud.com. He may also be seen presenting BizTalk-related material at local and international user groups.
Recently, Kent has co-authored two BizTalk books: Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration and (MCTS): Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 (70-595) Certification Guide.

    

 Steef-Jan Wiggers (MVP)
Location: Ede, The Netherlands

Steef-Jan is IT architect/Consultant with almost 15 years of experience as a technical lead developer and application architect, specializing in custom applications, enterprise application integration (BizTalk), Web services and Windows Azure. He has experience in architecting, designing, developing, and supporting sophisticated and innovative software using many different Microsoft technologies and products. Steef-Jan is very active in BizTalk community as blogger, Wiki author/editor, forums, writer and public speaker. He has been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award (2010) for his contributions to the world-wide BizTalk Server community. He has been re-awarded July 2011, July 2012 and July 2013. On his personal blog (Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges) and BizTalkAdminsBlogging he shares his knowledge around BizTalk, Windows Azure (ServiceBus) and Microsoft integration technology in general. His certifications are: MCSD, MCSD.NET, MCSA, MCDBA, MCAD, MCTS: BizTalk Server 2006, BizTalk Server 2006 R2 and BizTalk Server 2010. Steef-Jan is the author of the BizTalk Server 2010 Cookbook, published 5th of April 2012.