In my recent post I shared that I was leaving SAS after 18.5 years.  It has been overwhelming to see all the comments in response to that post on LinkedIn, Facebook and on the Blog post itself. Thank you to everyone for the kind words and for all you did to make my time at SAS the success it was. Seeing all those comments made me even more sad that I am leaving!

Many people have asked me where I am going next. The job market is a very interesting one at the moment and it was great to receive a number of offers to consider over the time of my search. Deciding where to go next was not easy especially with some self imposed constraints playing over and over again in my mind. I must also say that staying away from the shiny lights of the booming title is not as easy as it is to write down :-).

There are many great companies out there. I hope I will be able to stay in touch with those I spoke to moving forwards. Many thanks to each of them for considering me for their roles and for their time investment!

What’s Next

Now onto the future. I am now able share my next move. It is one I am very excited about.

I am going to go work for Microsoft (although I will remain located in Heidelberg, Germany) when not travelling as required.

There I will take up a role as a Senior Product Marketing Manager with a focus on the Internet Of Things and Advanced Analytics.

I am excited about taking up this role because it lets me work across a wide range of topics in the IoT space (Microsoft IoT Web Site). This includes being responsible for the Windows 10 IoT Core (my Raspberry Pi to play with is already on its way!) and at the same time for the Azure IoT Suite which brings a platform (for developing your own cloud hosted IoT solutions) and pre-packaged business solutions  to the table in the Microsoft Azure cloud today. Working in this space will allow me to increase my cloud knowledge and to work in the area of the market I think is going to be accelerating the most over the next few years – IoT from device to business solution.

Advanced Analytics is not a new topic for me but the move to doing that with a new stack with R at its core will be. I am looking forward to learning more about the capabilities of R and then using my previous knowledge to help that be applied to make organizations more analytically driven. As many people know Microsoft purchased Revolution Analytics back in early 2015. They have recently announced the Microsoft R Server and a whole host of other updates (covered nicely in this Forbes article).  I have a lot to learn and learning is always good!

My role is wide in its remit to help make the products that fall under my umbrella successful in the territory I will cover. I am looking forward to rolling up my sleeves and getting going to help with the mission of Microsoft which is to “Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more“.

Don’t Panic – I am not about to go exclusively Microsoft on Social Media

Those of you who come to my blog for impartial posts and those who follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter will hopefully notice little difference content wise. I will continue to share  material from all vendors in the market (even competitors as I do today) just as I have done in my time at SAS.

Having said that I hope I will also be able to share a little more around some of the specific things Microsoft, and their customers or partners, are doing to augment my normal posts as my knowledge builds.

Watch out for my last few posts about IoT and Hadoop before I take up my role at Microsoft. Thanks for reading and, as always, if you want to get in touch drop me an email at blogcontact@marktorr.com.