Simon BROWN

General Manager, Developer and Platform Evangelism, Microsoft EMEA

In 2003, Simon Brown was appointed General Manager of Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE), Microsoft Europe Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Simon, previously General Manager of Microsoft Sweden, brings with him to this position, relevant experience and passion for the developer community – Sweden is Microsoft’s most advanced .NET development market in EMEA.

In 2004, the DPE mission is even more strategic than in previous years, evangelizing the whole Microsoft platform, which includes our .NET strategy, the Windows Server System, developer tools, the Business Framework, Office, and Longhorn to the developer community and driving technical enablement and readiness of partners, including ISVs and Global SIs with special focus on the developer, architect, and BDM audiences. Simon looks forward to making the developer community wildly successful building Web services and applications for the Microsoft platform.

Simon joined Microsoft in 1993 after nine years at IBM. He has spent the last two years on assignment as General Manager of Microsoft Sweden, prior to which he was Enterprise and Partner Group (EPG) Director in the UK for four years. This is Simon’s second spell in the EMEA headquarters having been European Retail Industry Manager 1994-96.

While most of Simon’s career has been in sales and general management, his university degree was engineering mathematics including a thesis project writing a natural language interface in LISP to a fuzzy relational database! This preceded joining IBM into the PC software development division in 1983, the very year that the IBM Personal Computer was launched in Europe and subsequently qualifying as a Systems Engineer.

Simon and his family have moved back from Sweden to live in the UK. Simon and his wife and two sons aged ten and eight enjoy traveling, skiing, sailing, tennis and opera, although the latter without the kids.