LONDON, Oct. 28, 2003 — Microsoft Corp. today named Simon Brown general manager of the Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) Division for EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa). In his new post, Brown will be tasked with expanding Microsoft’s presence in the EMEA developer community and aiding developers in becoming fluent and productive on Microsoft®
.NET technologies. The development community under Microsoft DPE’s care includes the full range of developers, including enterprise, small business, independent software vendor (ISV) and academia.
“I’m excited about the opportunities we have in EMEA,” Brown said. “There are well over a million developers in this region building the next generation of software and applications. As more organizations embrace standards-based Web-services applications, they’ll see that Microsoft .NET is the fastest path toward innovation. Moving applications to .NET will immediately yield increased interoperability, reliability and security, but it will also future-proof applications by making them compatible with future versions of the Windows®
platform. Our job is to help developers make the move to the .NET Framework so they can take advantage of a whole new generation of Internet-based applications.”
Brown is responsible for outreach to the 1.5 million developers across the EMEA region, supported by a 2004 budget of $55 million (U.S.). Microsoft’s longstanding commitment to the region is reflected through more than 400,000 EMEA-based MSDN®
developers, 280,000 resellers, 26,000 ISVs and millions of small and medium-sized enterprises that already use Microsoft products.
“Microsoft is making a significant investment in the developer community in EMEA, which has fully embraced the Windows platform,” said Neil Holloway, vice president of Sales & Marketing for Microsoft EMEA. “Today our partnership with companies across the region is resulting in the employment of 1.5 million people who generate revenue for their businesses and local economies through deploying Microsoft solutions or using Microsoft technology to create new and complementary solutions.
“Compared with Microsoft, over 90 percent of the people in EMEA involved in revenue generated from activities related to Microsoft products are external to Microsoft. At the root of this opportunity is innovation that comes from our developer community, which is why I’m excited to have Simon leading Microsoft’s expanded outreach to this critical community in EMEA.”
Most recently, Brown served as country general manager for Microsoft in Sweden; previously he was director of the Microsoft Enterprise and Partner Group in the United Kingdom for four years. Before that, he was Microsoft European retail industry manager from 1994 to 1996. Before joining Microsoft in 1993, Brown spent nine years at IBM Corp. as a systems engineer and software developer.
While for most of his career Brown has been in management, his engineer’s degree from the University of Bristol was in mathematics; for his thesis project he wrote a natural language interface in LISP to a fuzzy relational database.
About the Microsoft Developer and Platform Evangelism Group
The Microsoft Developer and Platform Evangelism supports the adoption of the entire Microsoft platform, including .NET technologies, the Windows Server System (TM) , Visual Studio®
.NET, the .NET Framework, Microsoft Office, and Windows client operating systems, including the next major release of the Windows operating system. DPE works with enterprise developers, ISVs and academia to ensure understanding of Microsoft products and provide training and development assistance.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software — any time, any place and on any device.
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