Why I love webcasts

In 2001, with three more months left to finish my MBA program from University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, I left my job as a Technical Account Manager in Microsoft Premier Enterprise Support in Charlotte, North Carolina to take a job as a product manager on the emarketing initiative team in Redmond, Washington. I had spent the last 11 years deploying and supporting Novell 2.x - 3.11 networks, OS/2, MS Lan Manager - NT4 installations and support. While I enjoyed working as an IT Pro, I wanted to try use my MBA to try some new things, so I was very excited to take this new role. I actually flew from Seattle, Washington back to Chapel Hill, North Carolina for the remainder of the classes through the end of August, 2001 until I was I awarded my MBA later in December 2001.

However, I was up here maybe two weeks in May 2001, before I was caught up in the re-org of the day, and ended up in Developer marketing. My new job was now to build marketing kits and marketing collateral for others to market MSDN Events, run an internal newsletter called the US Developer Communiqué and start a webcast program for developers in my spare time. Somehow I didn’t think my new MBA skills were gong to get much use here.

With limited budget, I worked with internal speakers and a company called Interwise to get some live webcasts setup for developers to attend and learn. I looked at the content that was out there and didn't care for it, because it was mostly a sales message; rather than how to actually use the product or addressing a problem. Microsoft had some useful products, but the docmentation was poor, and if you wanted to be proficient in it, you had to figure out on your own how to use it, or spend a week and 2-5 thousand dollars in training. I had them strip out the fluff, and and them to add more code demos. The very first webcast brought in over 800 registrants. No incentives, no cool giveaways, or huge names to present. Steve Kirk, a Microsoft application architect, was presenting a webcast called architecting a .NET application. However we had all kinds of issues in the first six months ranging from firewall issues, VOIP dropping out, application sharing freezing with large numbers of customers attending webcasts at the same time. We got flamed pretty bad for that webcast. Working with platform and infrastructure teams, Interwise, and a host of others, we were able to get the Interwise ECP 4.0 release to work for our brand of technical webcasts with two way VOIP, application sharing, and start to scale out the live MSDN Webcasts from 50 attendees to 1000 live attendees per webcast by December 2001. Libby Mines came on board in March of 2002, and helped to scale us out from 8 webcasts a quarter to 180 webcasts a quarter. We’ve got so many webcasts out there it’s hard to search for a certain topic and or speaker.

I still wanted to take our webcasts to the next level, so I heled put together a proposal for a centralized webcasts team in 2002. My General Manager at that time, Jon Roskill, finally agreed to it and created a new webcasts team under the leadership of a great guy named Marc Tramonte. In Janaury 2003, the Microsoft Webcasts team was born, over the next few months we assembled some of the best talent in and out of Microsoft to take webcasts to the next level. Throughout 2003 and 2004, the Microsoft Webcasts team tackled tough issues that we knew were impacting the webcast customer experience. Nicole Stocker who drives our demand generation engine really extended our awareness and helped to quantify our demand generation activities for Microsoft webcasts. Jennifer Walts has turned into a force of nature on our webcasts team and helped to get webcast network programming and production tools in place to help us make the customer experience more consistent every day. Dean Andrews loves process, and he provided thought leadership to help us get processes in place to scale the program to the next level. You're seeing some cool webcast series and content coming out from us. It's no accident. Content has always been challenging, but we got a great guy named Anthony Tsim on board who really understands the developer tools and technolgies content, and where to get the most knowledgable folks to present. He's also the resident SWAG (Stuff We Always Get) king, and can tell you where all the cool giveaway stuff is coming from inside and outside Microsoft.

Our team is comprised of some of the most talented people I've had the pleasure to work. We work well together and compliment each others strengths and weaknesses, and have performed above my initial expectations. Our whole team works to ensure we're providing value and not B.S. to customers. I’m confident we’ll figure out the best webcasts solution for our customers and keep refining it overtime. We don’t always get the right answer the first time, but we’re persistent and very passionate about doing the right thing for our customers and our business. Even though we produce webcasts, I believe we're in communcations business leveraging webcasts and virtual labs to help communicate the value of Microsoft tools and technologies to our customers.

I've always been passionate about technology. I see technology has an enabler for learning and a way to better our lives in what ever field we work in. I believe technology itself is a fad, but it's constantly evolving to help us do achieve our goals faster and better, be more productive, and better communicators.

I believe webcasts are the next killer app of our century. It can be considered a disruptive technology, and a very effective vehicle for communicating technical information to attendees online (lives or on-demand).

Webcasts also have the potential to make our best teachers into the true rock stars that they are, and help students and teachers in disparate locations come together to learn and teach one another. Webcasts have the potential to redefine our lives, and change how we work and live. Imagine a world where you get to buy land in some remote location that you can work from remotely by webcasting in for meetings and being able to collaborate real time with your family, peers and clients. Imagine a world where you children can attend classes taught by the best instructors in the world where ever they are and where ever your children are. You take your instruction online and only go to schools for your exams. Teachers can get paid like the radio talk shows hosts based on ratings and how many students are attending their classes. If they're disruptive online, they get disconnected. Participation is always open to all provided they respect the educator and their fellow classmates.

Some of this is already happening now; some of if because of resources or the subject matter being taught wouldn’t be applicable. We use webcasts to stay in touch with our families with MSN Messenger, AOL Messenger, with web cams and the audio capabilities in MSN Messenger. With instant messaging or a live webcast, I can talk to my brother in Houston, Texas or my mom who isn't technical, but understands what it can do for her.

It's only going to get better. Right now, I work on a emarketing team that I believe is going to help others to be better developers, network administrators, database administrators, and technology leaders that are able to make better decisions because they have been able to stay up to date on the latest developer tools and technologies being developed by companies such as Microsoft and other companies in the IT and developer ecosystem.

I do my best to remove the marketing hype and show how the products actually work. Most people outside Microsoft don’t know this, but we have a content review team in place to make sure that marketing fluff stuff doesn’t make it on an MSDN Webcast. If it solves a customer problem, improves productivity, shows best practices on developing, deploying, and supporting developer tools and technologies, then we get it on MSDN Webcasts and MSDN Architecture Webcasts.

I love my work managing MSDN Webcasts and MSDN Architecture Webcasts. I hope you’ll join me on MSDN Webcasts and share my excitement around a better way to learn about developer tools and technologies.

Regards,

Georgeo Pulikkathara, MSDN Webcasts