ASP.NET/IIS MVP Eduardo Zabat Lorenzo

From: Philippines

Time as an MVP: 3 years

Blog: www.edulorenzo.wordpress.com

Which technical communities are you most active in?

MSPinoy: Microsoft Philippines Users Group

How did you first start in community?

Officer of .Net User Group

What's the best technical tip you have for implementing Cloud deployment?

DO NOT allow devs to use Visual Studio to deploy. An ideal deployment process should be similar to a SharePoint team, where there is a designated deployment manager who can keep track of changesets.

What do you tell people who are considering using the Cloud, but aren't sure about making the move?

Most of the time, when I ask why they are not sure yet I often get vague answers, but most revolve around "I don't know that much about it to make a decision,” so I go ahead and try to add to their knowledge by bringing up a few items.

• The 99.95% SLA- Not only does the Cloud offer such a high promise of uptime, it also offers extra services for recovery. For ISVs and startups, I show them how, with the cloud (Azure in particular), they will have a full data center and all the capabilities at their disposal without the large investment on hardware..
• Opex vs. Capex (operating expenses versus capital expenditures) - This area is still relatively new to the Philippines, so I try my best to shed some light. In the classic data center, a company will need to invest a huge amount of money in order to put up their datacenter, and invest even more money to maintain it. With the Cloud, a data center as a service or subscription eliminates the need to purchase the machinery, saving them money. And if this is not enough, I try to inject the pains of having to upgrade, maintain and then dispose of deprecated data center hardware and software.
• The global market- Most ISVs here in the Philippines still offer their applications as standalone and installable software. Very few have ventured into offering their apps as a service. With the Cloud, and modifications to the application, ISVs can then start to offer their product/s to a global market in a much simpler way, without the marketing efforts or putting up offices abroad etc.

What words of advice do you have for new MVPs?

In general, although MVPs are not “open source,” MVPs should still be open-minded. For Cloud/Azure in general, never talk about something you have not dealt with in real life.