Few days back I got a call from Microsoft India inviting me for an Round Table Dinner for partners with Mr.T.K.Rengarajan (Ranga), Corporate Vice President (On-Prem & Cloud Data Platforms), Microsoft Corporation, USA. Accepting the invite, I came to Bangalore today morning and got to meet up with few friends and partners here in the evening.
I was expecting this to be some gala event, with a keynote address by Ranga, followed by dinner with hundreds of attendees. To my surprise, there was no Keynote, no Presentations or even a Microphone. Microsoft had organized it to be an exclusive event, including me there were only handful of partners. Ranga was accompanied by his Technical Advisor, Support Heads and Program Managers running various Microsoft Data Platforms from Redmond (WA). Ranga and his team individually spent quality time with each of us, hearing our real life experiences of using Microsoft Data tools including SQL Server, Azure Document DB and others. It was super clear that they were there not for preaching but to listen and understand how companies of different sizes are using their products (and services), it is no more of Microsoft listening only to Fortune company CIOs, and do continuous improvements in the products and making it easier for developers to use them.
In the round table I asked questions that I had on database technologies in general, Microsoft products in particular and hear Ranga’s thoughts on them – How Database platforms are evolving super fast in the last few years due to Mobile scale needs; the fast changing landscape of NoSQL popularity requiring many of us to unlearn SQL/ACID techniques and learn new trade-off decisions; Microsoft’s huge investments in Databases in the cloud including SQL Azure, DocumentDB & PowerBI; Microsoft’s unique position among Database vendors due to having first hand experience of running large number of DBs in cloud through SQL Azure/DocumentDB. Overall an insightful conversation which I capped with having several servings of mouth watering White Gulab Jamuns.
From Left – Amit Bansal, Praveen Srivatsa, T.N.C.Venkata Rangan, T.K.Rengarajan (in blue shirt).