Meet Brian - Group Manager in the Global Network Svsc team

 My name is Brian,  I am a Group Manager for the Shared Platform Services group of the Global Networking Services team (GNS) which is a part of our Global Foundation Services (GFS) organization.  My team ensures that our shared infrastructure is operating within acceptable levels, such as active directory and backups along with 7 other operationally critical services.  This has been job 9 for me in the past 3 years at Microsoft and prior to that I was working at Intel Corporation where I spent almost 11 years.  The biggest challenge during this time was to continue to push and innovate during the constant changes.   I have been part of technology and infrastructure services since 1991 while I was in the Marine Corps as a network engineer and messaging exchange operator (before enterprise email).   I have been a network engineer, an IT business manager, as well as manager for the American Red Cross Technology Distribution Center during the Katrina disaster; and would not trade my experiences for anything.  I have also had the opportunity to work and live in many places around the world with my last international location as the IT Country Manager in South East Asia and living in Manila, Philippines.  I was able to work with and lead some exciting organization is Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Philippines.  I enjoy working with an international group and like the diverse opinions and ideas that come from such as environment.  I think that we can leverage this more at Microsoft and hope to see more diverse decision making in our future. I am most excited about the fact that we get to work on technology that actual external customers are using and that is why the BOS space seems to me the most interesting.  This, along with working around extraordinarily smart people and the adventures and innovations that we have been pioneering makes coming to work a pleasure. 

 

Currently we are working on innovations in every service; a total redesign for SMTP leveraging Exchange, and a new Microsoft backup product DPM, and even feeding vital information back to our product teams about the limits of our own products.  Now is the time to tackle the difficult problems and look ahead, there will be plenty of time to reminisce once we are done….whenever that may be.