The mission of Azure Data is to help customers build a new class of data-first applications and drive a data culture where every employee can make better decisions based on data. Arun leads product management, engineering, and cloud operations for databases, data integration, big data analytics, messaging, business intelligence, and cognitive search. The products in his team’s portfolio include Azure SQL DB, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure PostgreSQL, Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Grid, and Power BI. Previously, as the General Manager of the APAC Cloud & Enterprise Division, Arun was responsible for growing Microsoft’s Windows Azure, Windows Server, SQL Server, and Business Intelligence businesses for Microsoft in the Asia Pacific region based out of Singapore. Before moving to Singapore, Arun held worldwide accountability for growing Microsoft’s SQL Server business with enterprise customers. Arun founded Think Business Networks, Inc., a vendor of specialized network management software based out of Silicon Valley. Arun grew the company profitably for six years to over 60 employees before selling his stake and heading to Stanford Graduate School of Business for his MS in Management.

Amir Netz is a Technical Fellow and chief architect of the Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) offerings. Amir is focused on the democratization of BI through end-user self-service enablement using Microsoft Office, SharePoint and SQL Server

Wangui leads enterprise product marketing for the Analytics business within the Azure portfolio which includes technologies like Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, and Azure Data Factory to name a few. Prior to her current role, Wangui lead enterprise product marketing for Windows, Windows 365, Office and Intune. Before joining Microsoft in 2021, she spent 13 years at IBM in various marketing leadership roles. While at IBM, Wangui was VP of Product Marketing for IBM Security and was CMO for Red Hat Marketplace and IBM Hybrid Cloud Ecosystem. Wangui received her Bachelor of Science from Florida A&M University and Master of Business Administration from Emory University.

Yitzhak Kesselman is Vice President for the Messaging & Real-Time Analytics suite of products at Microsoft. The team’s mission is to enable businesses to make their operations highly data-driven by getting insights and taking actions in real time over billions of observations from across the organization. The team delivers Event Streams, KQL Databases, and Data Activator in Microsoft Fabric, as well as Azure Data Explorer, Stream Analytics, Event Hub, Event Grid, and Service Bus in Azure. Prior to that Yitzhak was leading Alphabet’s Monitoring products, critical for the reliability of Alphabet’s production infrastructure and products. The products provide actionable insights into service health metrics consequently impacting the reliability of all products from Google search to autonomous vehicles that serve 4B+ users worldwide. Prior to joining Google, Yitzhak was leading Power BI Platform team (now Fabric Platform team) that delivered the infrastructure, common functionality and operations to Power BI and other Azure Data cloud services. Yitzhak and his team scaled the service more than 12x getting it the best in class service by Gartner and Forster.

Kim Manis is the Vice President of Product for Microsoft Fabric and Power BI. Before her time on the Fabric team, Kim worked on all sorts of products ranging from productivity software, social networks, and online retail.

Product management lead of Data Science and AI in Microsoft Fabric. Since 2016, Nellie has been defining ML experiences and capabilities in Microsoft data products like SQL Server (ML Services), Synapse and now Fabric.

Justyna leads the Fabric Data Engineering & Data Science PM team, focusing on experiences like the lakehouse, notebooks, Spark jobs, models & experiments. Her team focuses on empowering data engineers to build out a lakehouse architecture & data scientists to train and operationalize ML models. Prior to working on Fabric, Justyna led the Power BI AI team.

Patrick LeBlanc is a currently a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft and a contributing partner to Guy in a Cube. Along with his 15+ years’ experience in IT he holds a Masters of Science degree from Louisiana State University. He is the author and co-author of five SQL Server books. Prior to joining Microsoft he was awarded Microsoft MVP award for his contributions to the community. Patrick is a regular speaker at many SQL Server Conferences and Community events.

Muazma is a seasoned Data and AI leader with deep expertise in Big Data, Cloud, and AI technologies. At Microsoft, she leads product teams enabling customers to run high-performance, enterprise-grade data workloads in the cloud with Azure Data. With a background as a Data Engineer and Architect, Muazma brings a powerful combination of technical depth, product strategy, and customer empathy. Beyond her work at Microsoft, Muazma is also a LinkedIn Learning instructor with courses on Breaking bias in tech and Building AI-ready applications with Microsoft Azure. Her machine learning research is embedded in EKG machines used around the world, and she is a sought-after tech speaker known for making cutting-edge topics both accessible and actionable.

Priya Sathy brings over 25 years of experience in the data and analytics space focusing on building capabilities that meet the needs and complexities of large-scale data platforms at enterprises. She currently is head of product for SQL Databases at Microsoft including Microsoft SQL Server, Azure SQL and Fabric SQL Database. Prior to this, Priya was head of product for Data Warehousing, Enterprise BI in Power BI and various other data and analytics products.

Tessa Kloster is a passionate and experienced product manager working on Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric. With experience in data integration, modeling, and business intelligence, she enjoys building user-friendly solutions that address complex business challenges. Her work spans across various Microsoft products, including Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Dynamics 365, focused on development of AI and BI insights features.

Mohammad Ali is a GPM for the Power BI Self Service team who looks after the PM team for Power BI Service and Desktop including copilot

Sujata Narayana, a data nerd at heart, joined Microsoft’s user analytics team in 2016 and Power BI team in 2018. She leads Power BI's user onboarding and data modeling experiences. Sujata strives to democratize analytics by empowering everyone to make data-driven decisions.

Lead Program Manager- Elite Influencers (MVP, RD, Super Users, UG Leaders), Events, & Community w/ Data Engineering at Microsoft Data Platform MVP (2016-2019)

Bob Ward is a Principal Architect for the Microsoft Azure Data team, which owns the development for Microsoft SQL Ground to Cloud. Bob has worked for Microsoft for 31 years on every version of SQL Server shipped from OS/2 1.1 to SQL Server 2022 including Azure SQL. Bob is a well-known speaker on SQL Server, Azure SQL, AI, and Microsoft Fabric often presenting talks on new releases, internals, and specialized topics at events such as SQLBits, Microsoft Build, Microsoft Ignite, PASS Summit, Fabric Community Conference, and VS Live. You can also learn Azure SQL from him on the popular series https://aka.ms/azuresql4beginners. You can follow him at @bobwardms or linkedin.com/in/bobwardms. Bob is the author of the books Pro SQL Server on Linux, SQL Server 2019 Revealed, Azure SQL Revealed, SQL Server 2022 Revealed, and Azure SQL Revealed 2nd Edition available from Apress Media.