Firebrand Stories

Dan Oliver's Story

I run a small managed services provider. I love what I do as we are able to really impact on our customers profitability and productivity. We also get to help young people get a solid start in their IT career, and that's something that will always be improve tang to the company. I founded my company in 2014 having worked for Microsoft from 2001 to 2015 in a number of Cloud, Infrastructure and Systems Management related roles.

I needed to obtain MCSD Azure Solutions Architect certification. Apprentices are critical to my companies growth and social goals. Having the most relevant training coupled with mentoring and real world project experience has allowed us to develop a highly skilled specialist workforce. And I was struggling having not done software development for some time. I had a limited amount of time available, and already new the basics.

We live and breath Azure and it's a quickly changing product, so learning the overall capabilities of Azure and drilling into specific capabilities like Media Services, Cloud Services, Service Bus and ARM was a great way for us to learn. Having gained the MCSD Azure certification for myself and my team has allowed us to demonstrate our capability within Microsoft and our customers.