Recently I had a conversation through email with Oliver Hauth, the person who as a BizTalk community member I like to bring to the foreground in this blog post. He has been awarded Microsoft Valuable Professional little over a year ago. I met Oliver in Berlin during the TechEd Europe 2010 and we’ll probably meet again during the upcoming TechEd Europe 2012 in Amsterdam. He is a passionate IT professional, BizTalk forum member and fun guy to hang out with. Here is his story.
Oliver is 32 years old and lives in Germany. He is married and with his wife has a two year old daughter. They are expecting their second child in September. He is the team coordinator and lead architect, responsible for the area of Business Process Integration and Workflow Solutions at MAN Diesel & Turbo SE. His job covers mostly BizTalk Server, SharePoint and Nintex Workflow, SQL Server Reporting Services, SQL Server Integration Services and Forefront Identity Management.
Oliver was introduced to BizTalk Server at MAN Diesel & Turbo SE a few years ago. He started as a lightweight developer, trying to understand the system. From that moment he started focusing more to be a landscape and solution architect for distributed applications and cloud solutions in general. One of his key skills is finding the BizTalk based solution for the more complex scenarios (dynamic routing, property / content based routing , multi-part messages, filter criteria).
Oliver’s view of BizTalk is and I quote:
“The biggest advantage of BizTalk server is the great tooling and monitoring toolkit. It delivers the stable basis we need for our daily work in the enterprise as well as the flexibility to connect to a wide range of systems. With the newer versions and the enhancements of WCF adapters and Azure bindings it integrates much better in the new .NET world and is shows that it’s built to integrate with current cloud solutions. Furthermore it’s fun to develop. When starting with BizTalk you do not really understand how the tool works, but once you’re into it you can impress a lot of people with how quickly and flexible you can build integration processes.”
Oliver spends most of his time with his family; trying to spend at least the evening with his daughter and wife. Besides that he has just started building their new house, which will consume a lot of time during the next 12 months. The remaining (few) hours he normally uses to have a look at new technologies, listen to music (from what he saw at Facebook we have a very similar taste) or play some video games. From time to time Oliver reads a non-technical book (mostly when he’s on holiday).
Oliver started doing some Wing-Tsung with two colleagues. Furthermore he likes watching NFL / Football games if he can find a German TV channel showing these games (not very popular here). He also plans to reactivate his skiing activity in the future – if he can find the time to do so.
Oliver’s final quote:
“Keep reading this blog – Steef-Jan is doing an amazing job. Also keep in mind: BizTalk’s not dead. Have a look at Azure and AppFabric but do not give up BizTalk too early. It’s still one of the strongest tools on the market.
Especially to your German readers: If you use BizTalk please start participating in the community, we need you!”
I like to thank Oliver for his contributions to the BizTalk community and time to have a chat with me.I will probably meet him again in June during TechEd Europe.