Organizers

SO WHO IS PUTTING THIS SHINDIG TOGETHER, ANYWAY?

Comms vNext is a conference that is being organized by passionate community members with a desire to bring other community members together at a Microsoft UC-focused conference. Think Lync Conference, but by the Community (More on that Here). Meet the team:

Josh’s ~20 year career started with various roles as a server technologies generalist, but over the last several years these roles have focused in on the unified communications path. Josh now specializes in the conferencing space, including meetings and voice applications, as well as the various certified devices that support this space.

This specialization has become a passion for Josh, leading to immersive content creation and management of learning groups on social media, as well as conference organizing and speaking.

Prior to joining Time2Market, I spent 11 years working in the services organization at Nortel/Avaya. However, going back even further, I started working on Microsoft products back on Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroups, and actually hold an MCSE on Windows NT 4.0 (earned the hard way). I pride myself in being a true Converged Engineer… being able to communicate with the network engineer, voice engineer, server administrator, and business leaders in their native terminology and being able bring them all together on the same page when deploying Microsoft Unified Communication solutions.

Lately, I’ve been taking all of my past experience and finding interesting new ways to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to increase productivity and solve problems for my customers. We’ve spent years collecting data in various formats and now AI is giving us new and interesting ways of finding insights with that data.

Adam Ball, co-founder at Cloud Revolution, has led practices and teams of people to achieve amazing results. Having architected and led the delivery teams for Communications and Collaboration projects for some of the world’s most notable companies, Adam is consistently focused on delivering on excellent experience for end-users.

A noted speaker, Adam has had the privilege of speaking multiple times at Microsoft Ignite and VMWorld in addition to other conferences and user groups.

Adam believes in the power of community when it comes to collaboration and founded the Colorado Unified Communications User Group in 2011. Adam is a Microsoft MVP and earned his first award in 2014. Through his recognition as an MVP, Adam is known by the Microsoft Teams product group and gives feedback regularly to help improve the product.

Pat Richard is a technology professional with ~30 years of IT experience. Currently working for Innervation LLC, Pat specializes in Unified Communications solutions around the Microsoft UC stack. He is a published author, speaker, and UC community advocate. He has been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award 15 times for work with Exchange, Lync, Skype for Business, and Teams. Visit Pat’s blog at https://ucunleashed.com, and follow him on Twitter @PatRichard.

SO WHO IS PUTTING THIS SHINDIG TOGETHER, ANYWAY?

JOSH BLALOCK (@EXPERTOFTHINGS)

JONATHAN MCKINNEY (@UCOMSGEEK)

ADAM BALL (@ADAMCBALL)

PAT RICHARD (@PATRICHARD)