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Mark Relph
Vice President, Developer & Platform Evangelism Group, Microsoft Canada Co.
As Vice President of the Developer & Platform Evangelism (DPE) Group, Mark Relph’s mission is to connect with Canada’s technology professionals to develop skills; build momentum around key strategic Microsoft technologies, and nurture Canadian technology innovation.
The DPE organization evangelizes the benefits and capabilities of the Microsoft platform and looks to build connections with the communities of developers, IT professionals, designers and ISVs across Canada. To support this, Mark’s organization builds a robust set of technical community engagement programs such as MSDN and TechNet. Mark’s team helps Microsoft drive the early adoption of emerging elements of the Microsoft platform such as Software-plus-Services. His team also has a focus on enhancing the ecosystem of technology vendors in Canada, including working with ISVs, start-ups and the venture capital community. Mark also works with technology students, faculty and academic institutions across Canada. Mark was instrumental in helping launch Microsoft’s first entrepreneur-focused Innovation Centre in Waterloo and helped forge Microsoft Canada’s recent alliance with the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD).
Mark is very engaged in the Canadian technology community and regularly tweets and blogs about various technology related topics. He also speaks about the future of technology and the industry in Canada at technology conferences across the country.
Mark has held positions in several different parts of Microsoft Canada. Prior to his current position, he was the Group Manager of the Developer Team within the Developer & Platform Evangelism Group. Before moving to DPE, Mark was the Manager of the Network Service Provider Solutions Team. In this role he led a sales team focused on building .NET services in conjunction with Service Providers such as telecommunications and wireless providers. Prior to that Mark was a Business Development Manager working with Canadian technology start-ups and venture capital firms. While with the E-Commerce Business Development team, he was responsible for working with enterprise accounts such as Future Shop, Radio Shack and Chapters.ca, to help them deploy their businesses online. Mark originally joined Microsoft as a Technology Specialist. Before joining Microsoft in May 1998, Mark was a Systems Engineer at Digital Equipment specializing in the development of Microsoft solutions.
