 Hey, everyone, this is Christian Buckley with another MVP buzz chat, and I'm here today with Tijani. Hello. Hi, Christian. Thank you very much for having me today. It's great to have you. And I know that we're we're both feeling slightly under the weather, but hopefully this should be good. Yeah, of course. Well, for folks that don't know who you are, where you are, and what you do, why don't you give us that introduction? OK, perfect. So my name is Tijani Belmansoor. I'm a cloud solution architect. I work for a consulting company called Kofomo. You may see the logo just behind me. I'm in one of our meeting room right now. So I'm also a Microsoft MVP for the Azure category since 2019. What else is about me? I'm based in Quebec City, Canada. So I'm basically a French speaking guy trying to speak English. So sorry in advance if my English is not so good. I'm doing my best. That's great. And we have, you know, there's a number of MVPs that are up in the region. I always loved at the MVP summits. Well, in fact, so you became an MVP before the pandemic. So did you attend one of the in-person events, the summits? No, unfortunately, no. I didn't yet have this pleasure. Why? Because when I was nominated, it was back in August 2019. So the MP summit was already passed. Right. Yeah. OK. Yeah. I'm crossing my finger. I hope that they get back to normal. But one of the things that's funny as an American MVP is that I was always very jealous of how organized the Canadian MVPs were and would all get like matching zip up hoodies and take the photos there with the red with the white, you know, the leaf on it. And, you know, but it was always really organized. And I appreciated that about the Canadian MVPs. Of course, we'd never get ourselves together in any category within the US to take a good photo together. But I realize there's more MVPs in the US than anywhere else. And that would be a lot of people. But even like I was originally a SharePoint MVP and, you know, even getting the SharePoint MVPs together, it was never very successful. OK. So that's something you have to look forward to. Yeah. Yeah, that doesn't mean we can't do it. Just start a movement. Exactly. Well, I know that there are a lot of efforts going on. And you can see this with events around the world where I think this pent up demand for seeing other human beings in person and going to events. So there's little side social activities with MVPs and other, you know, of course, speakers and stuff for the various events. But there's a concerted effort to get people back together on the side and do and do this. They like MVP networking, which is great to see. Well, tell me, though, about your Azure background. So what areas of Azure do you actually focus on? OK, just before I jump on that question, I want to make a quick comment on what you just have said about bringing people together physically. Yeah, we missed a lot in person events for the next the last two years. Sorry. I'm I didn't mention it. I'm the co-organizer of the Azure Quebec community. You know, we have about something close to 1200 members actually for the global Azure 2022. We will host an in-person event. So now that we can. Yeah. There's not that many of them that were being planned that I saw. And for what do you tell people what that is? Because it's an annual event. Exactly. Exactly. It's an annual event. It's a three day event. It's free. It's open to anyone, no matter your level of expertise regarding the Azure of a platform. You are more than welcome to join. There's certainly a lot of learning opportunities for anyone and everyone. And it happens all around the world. Yes, before the pandemic, it used to be an in-person event. And what's cool about in-person events, it's the gathering with people. You have to meet people, make connections with which is a little bit harder in a virtual event. It's not impossible, but it's a little bit harder. So, yeah, this year we decided since regulation allow us to gather in-person. So we decided to host an in-person event on Saturday, May 7. So the last day of the global Azure event we already found a location, we already found speakers and we are working to find a sponsor to provide the food and beverages and so on. So I've helped organize that event here in my local region. I know that it was so sad to see so many cancellations over the last two years around that event. And so it's what it is for folks too. It's a globally coordinated so that within that span of three days, people go and put on a we did a full day event like within that window. And so we could share resources. We could share if there are specific initiatives and I'm not plugged into it this year. And so I was hoping to attend one of the virtual ones but wasn't going to organize something this year. But that's another one of those things where if you want to get involved in your local region, find out if there's not an Azure event happening in the beginning of May in your region, that's something that you can organize. Microsoft provides resources like they there's funds for for buying lunch for everybody. There's swag that's sent out. I mean, so it's really nice to go and do. But obviously we're we were hoping to be back in person before we started organizing and when the first call like the mentioned a reminder for doing the event came out, I think almost everybody globally was still talking about doing virtual. So we just kind of said, we'll wait until next year. Yeah, yeah, that's that's right. So for on our side here in Quebec City, what we decided to do is to mix virtual with in person. So we're hosting a virtual session on the first and second day, so May 5th and May 6th and an in person event on May 7th. So like as we hope to reach out to as many people as we can. So some people prefer virtual, some people prefer in person events and they simply won't show up to an virtual event. OK, but by mixing the two strategies, we hope to reach out to as many people as we can. That's great. That's great. So back to the other question, though. So what areas of Azure do you focus on? OK, so a little bit about my Azure background. So I started looking at Azure back in 2009, OK, when Azure was in its early stages. I was working for a consulting company, another consulting company at that time. And I started to look at what's this thing called cloud computing and what is called Azure and how this will change the IT landscape of our customers. What are the impact on our customers and their operation? I started evangelizing Azure to our C-suite so in order for them to be conscious of the beginning of the cloud and the impact it will have on our customers and our business. And I started my first production project for customers on Azure back in 2012 to 2012 since today, I'm working with Azure. I'm from a developer background, OK? So one funny thing when Azure first came out is that the IT pro guys thought that they were be losing their jobs because that was a big topic, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we faced a lot of angry people who didn't understand why this thing is happening and they will lose their job and so on. But the fact is they don't lose their job. If anyone look at LinkedIn or Indeed or any recruiting platform, we will see that there is the demand for skilled IT pros on cloud, not only Azure, but also other clouds is exploding. What we told people at that time is your role, your job isn't in danger, OK? What will happen? It's a shift of your role. You will have to get new skills to change the way you do some things. For example, it's no more plugging cables and updating hardware and so on. So this, of course, is now on the responsibility of the cloud provider, but you still have your role. And you have more value to the company rather than just focusing on the hardware because the company, its purpose, its sole purpose is to provide value to their customer. Your customer, just to give an example that I used to say a lot, almost everyone uses Netflix or have a Netflix account or a Disney plus or a Hulu or anything else. Does that change anything for you to know that they are hosting their own servers rather than using a cloud platform or that they have top-talented people and cutting-edge hardware? No, as long as the service works, you have what you are paying for, which is entertainment. You can watch your favorite movie or favorite series. You don't care about what's happening in the company, what hardware they're running on and so on. So that's a shift in mentality. We often hear the cattle versus pets example. So back in the old days, IT pros used to take care of their servers and make sure they are always up and running, update them as they become obsolete and so on. Now in the cloud era, we don't really care about that infrastructure. So there is an issue. We just kill those VM and spin up on more VMs and we keep going. So that's a shift in mentality, but there are still opportunities for all the existing roles. Just people need to understand that there will be a shift in their duties. So they have to learn new skills. They have to forget about some things that they used to do in favor of some new things that they will have to do. And that's a bit complicated. So in the company I work for, Coformal, we used to help customers in their journey to the cloud. And one thing we noticed for the many years we are doing this right now, it's never a question of skills or technology. It's always a question of people, mentality and mindset. Most of the time we face resistance in people that they don't want to change their old habit, they think they do and so on. So that's the hardest part. But that's true in every aspect of business. I say this all the time that an organization that is good at change management, at good at, and from not change management, from a technical change management, the broader statement of change, managing change, identifying that change is gonna come, interpret the impacts, build a plan, go with it, but you're continually looking at how are things changing, how do we need to change the business? Organizations that get good at that have a distinct competitive advantage over those that do not. I've worked in some organizations that were really good at that change function. And there were other things that they weren't good at, but they were really good at that of constantly, it was part of operations management to continually looking at the business factors, the internal factors, the technology, the people, the process changes, and making adjustments there. And so it was a great training ground for, this was before I got into the SharePoint world and the Microsoft ecosystem. And it was, so it was good practice coming from that into this space where change is just so rapid. There's so much going on. That's the other side. I look at it, there's so much that's going on in a space, how can you push back against change? I mean, there's everything about our world in the Microsoft ecosystem. There's just constant change that's going on. That's very true on the, that the change accelerates almost every year. One example I was asked a couple of days ago, how do our customers keep up with the rapid change of the net version? So right now it's about one major version per year. So we'll keep pace with that. Are they forced to change or update their version each year? For small companies might be a couple of days effort, but we work mainly with government agencies and we're talking about month and month of effort to bring a new version of that net to their ecosystem. So that's some discussion that we need to have with our customers and make them understand that there are no LDS version versus non-LDS version. They have to understand that and make sure that the version they choose is really providing business value, not just technical does. Not just because our development team want to use the latest and greatest feature of that net. It's not enough to decide to move to the latest version. So there are also things to be changed in the operation management at those companies. It impacts a lot of different levels. Training it to do the roles of responsibilities around that as well as the solutions that you've developed around that. Well, it's very cool. So let me tell you in a couple of minutes that we have left. So you talked about the Azure event. What other community activities are you involved in? And what I'd also love to know is kind of what was your path to becoming an MVP? Was there anything specifically? Yeah, that's actually a great question. So just to bring a little bit about my background, I started programming back in 1988. I was eight-year-old at the time. I'm sick with asthma since I'm a very young kid. So back in summer 1988, I was in a center for other kids who have this disease. And it was all summer long. And we had activities that were proposed by this center in order to keep us entertained and to learn new things, open new horizons to us. And one day, a teacher came there and he started teaching us programming. It was on a Yamaha MSX keyboard. I don't know if you already knew about that. It's a keyboard that you have to plug to a TV in order to have a display. And it basically had only five applications. There was a game, a text editor, a drawing application. I don't remember the fourth one, but the fifth one was a QBasic compiler. And that's the one I spent the most of my time with. So for me, it was fascinating to see that you can simply enter commands in plain English to a computer and the computer responds back with actions. It can do action that you tell him to do. Okay, that was extraordinary for me. So my first program that I was very proud of, it was a basic calculator. I guess almost everyone after the famous Hello World started to develop a basic calculator. And then a few years later, my parents offered me my first computer. It was back in 1997. And I started to learn Pascal at that time, if you know that language. And then C and C++ and after that, I started to use the Visual C++4 and when I started, I created my first MFC application and it was basically just a screen with one button on it and a message box that is displayed as you click on the button. But it was so cool to see it living right by the side of Word and Excel and other professional application. So that was awesome at that time. So I kept going like that and it only grew my passion for computing. And I'm the kind of guy that likes to teach others. Why? Because I truly believe that you learn more and better by trying to teach others. If you try to explain something to someone, you have to think about it. How will I explain this to that person? What word would I choose? What example will I show him or her? And by doing this exercise, you may find that there are some things that you think that you understand, that you don't truly understand. You may think you understand it in your mind. But then when somebody asks you to explain something and you're like, okay, I thought I explained that aspect of it and then you have to change the perspective on that. Right, so it helps you kind of make your understanding of a topic more robust, more sustainable. Exactly, that's exactly the thing. So I have this love of sharing what I know actually as soon as I learn something or understand something, I love to share it with other people. So that's what put me on the path to becoming an MVP. So for many years, I was a teaching professor and I wrote blogs, but for internal companies I worked for. So it was internal blogs. I gave a lot of presentations and so on. And one day I met with Simran Choudhury, which was the community manager for the Canadian MVPs. And I told him that I would be interested to apply for the MVP program and he told me, okay, all the things that you did are great, but it's not community activities. So you have to share your knowledge, your expertise with the world, not just with a closed community. So I started blogging, I started presenting at the community events and so on. And two years later I applied for the MVP program and I was nominated and that's what put me on the path to become an MVP. Yeah, I mean obviously I love asking the question, the patterns are always the same. Like it's a very similar response, but I mean that just should be reinforcing for people to know that by getting out there, as you said, like you're working in the technology, you're passionate about that and you're sharing what you're learning along the way, teaching people, answering questions, asking questions, which a lot of times it's just as important as answering questions and providing that feedback back to Microsoft and developing a relationship with Microsoft, which is also important as part of that. But those are similar patterns. Yeah, for me the most important trait of someone who wants to apply to be an MVP is the desire to share what he knows, okay? And one piece of advice I want to share here is you don't need to be an expert in your area before you start sharing, okay? You just have to share what you learned, what you know and if you are wrong, that's okay. The community will tell you and you will learn and everyone will learn together. So be bold, have the courage to go out there and share with people and discuss with people and exchange ideas. Because we know in our world, in the IT world, there are always more than one correct answer. Yep, that's great. That's great insights there too. And Tejani, I really appreciate you taking the time to meet today as we wrap up. So people want to get in touch with you. What are the best ways to reach you via social? Yeah, you can reach out to me either through Lincoln or through Twitter. So it's Tejani underscore B. Excellent. Well, it's great meeting you. And hopefully I will see each other maybe next spring at the next MVP summit in person. I hope it happens. I would love to. I hope it will be an important event again. Thank you very much for having me, Christian. It was such a pleasure and an honor to be on your show today. Thank you very much. Talk to you soon. Bye. Talk to you soon.