This year I like to continue with the BizTalk Community Series. In January 2012 I started with Tord G. Nordahl, who recently was awarded Microsoft Integration MVP. He was very committed to the BizTalk community for quite a while and proven to be a great contributor to the community. I ended with 25th story on my colleague Sander Nefs.

The story today will be on Mark Brimble a Principle Integration Architect since 2007 for Datacom in Auckland, New Zealand (NZ). This company has the largest group of BizTalk professionals in NZ (24 people). He spends most of his spare time with my wife Margaret and daughter Rebecca. Rebecca is a bassoon player and Mark attends her concerts when he can. He also enjoys travelling with my wife who speaks at many overseas conferences. 
Mark also enjoys playing chess and likes to go fishing. He plays tennis and golf when time allows. When it comes to team sports Mark supports the All Blacks rugby team and any team playing Australia.

Mark’s outline of his career:

“Before BizTalk I was a support analyst for eGate which is now JavaCaps (in another life I was a chemist but that is another story). I was introduced to BizTalk 2002 in 2003 by Emil Velinov and Thiago Almeida. I decided then that BizTalk was my future. When Thiago left that company I had to assume not only an administrator but also a developer role. After migration from to BizTalk 2004 and then to BizTalk 2006 I wanted to move to a role where I was only responsible for development and I moved to Datacom as BizTalk developer. After a while at Datacom I was pleased to renew my relationship with Thiago when he also joined. At that time all the buzz was the new WCF adapters in BizTalk 2006R2 and look back now at all the fun we had learning how to use them. Since BizTalk 2009 I have spent more time designing integration solutions, pre-sales presentations and mentoring BizTalk developers. We have some promising BizTalk developers so watch out for them because I think one of them might be Datacom’s next MVP.”

Mark has always been a fan of the BizTalk development experience and the administration console since he first saw it in BizTalk 2004. He likes the way you can build/configure a simple interface very quickly and the monitoring is always there. The most challenging thing Mark has ever had to do was write a WCF socket adapter to connect to vending machines. The project that this was for won an award.

Mark started his blog as a bit of a dare from one of his colleagues. He tried to write something every month and it is a record of his integration projects. Mark also feels it is a way of giving a little bit back to the community that has helped him so much in the past.

“If one person is helped by my blog then it is all worthwhile.”

I could not agree more. Thank you Mark for your time and contributions to the community.

Cheers,

Steef-Jan