Daniel Valik

Daniel Jonathan Valik is an industry expert in Private/Public Cloud, IOT, DevOps, Developer Platform and tools, Unified Communications and Collaborations technologies, Telecommunications, WebRTC, Mobile Platform development, Communications Enabled Business Process design and Contact Center technologies. Daniel has been driving the above topics than 15 years in the IT and Telecommunication industry and has also lived and worked in different regions like Europe, South East Asia and United States. Daniel is currently a Sr. Product Marketing Manager for the Cloud Service Provider business, DevOps and Cloud Native Apps at the VMWare HQ in Palo Alto, California and he drives the strategy and positioning of VMWare services and products in this space. Previously to this role, Daniel was the Sr. Technical Product Manager for Skype Developer Platform and Skype for Business at the Microsoft and Skype HQ in Redmond, USA and drove the positioning of Skype for Business, WebRTC, Skype for Business Online, Developer Platform, UC enabled contact center and other topics within his team. He also was previous to this role a Sr. Product Marketing Manager in the Business Planning team and a Sr. Program Manager - Unified Communications in the Global Business Operations & Strategic Services division where he drove first plans to ship PSTN and telephony in Office 365 so as the first “cloud” contact centers with Skype for Business. Daniel was born and grown up in “Baden bei Wien” in Austria and started his early career at a small computer shop in his hometown close to Vienna, Austria where he worked as a hardware engineer on PCs and servers. After his first job, he served the Military for about a year and continued his career as a Systems Engineer for Linux Debian and Suse support at a small telecommunications provider. Then he moved on to a well-known service and software company in Germany, Materna Information and Communications, where he designed, developed and led customer projects for Unified Messaging, Speech Recognition and mobile technology projects in Western Europe. After almost 6 years in Materna as Systems Engineer, Architect, Presales expert and later as the Product Solution Manager, he made his move to Microsoft Austria and Western Europe. In this new opportunity, Daniel was a Senior Product Specialist for Unified Communications and Mobility and was responsible for developing and executing ‘sales and go to market’ initiatives to help enterprises evaluate and justify investment for adoption of Microsoft UC technologies/solutions. During this time he developed partnerships with Samsung, HTC, Polycom, HP, Kapsch, Telekom Austria, T-Mobile, T-Systems, Bechtle, Dialogic, AudioCodes and many other international companies within this area. He also played the role of Project Architect to integrate Microsoft Unified Communications & Collaboration (UCC) solutions with 3rd party equipment and devices like Nortel IP PBX with Exchange’s Unified Messaging, Polycom HDX 9000 conferencing system with Microsoft OCS R2, Dialogic gateway with OCS etc. As the lead of UCC @ Cloud initiative, Daniel led the team to help customer evaluate options (On-premise, cloud base or hybrid) and develop business cases enabling customer’s executives to make informed decisions. Next to this, he also led the initiative to help customers evaluate UCC technologies/solutions (especially OCS/Lync versus Cisco and IBM) by providing solution scenarios, technology comparisons, competitive analysis and Communication-Enabled Business Process (CEBP) to make a ‘facts’ based decision with ROI justification and alignment of business and IT objectives. This process often required him to play the Architect role to design, build and execute Proof of Concept (POC) projects to support the Microsoft product marketing and product management teams. After Microsoft Austria, he made another career decision to move his home base to Hong Kong and then Singapore where he drove business development, product management and product marketing for Unified Communications for an important Microsoft Lync partner, Unify Square APAC. Daniel holds a number of technical certifications including MCT (Microsoft Certified Trainer). He has a double Master’s Degree (MBA) and a Master Degree (MAS) in General Business, additionally he holds a degree for International Business Management. He is the author of several books like “The Renaissance of Communication and Collaboration”1, which is the first German book about UC with a mix of business and technology, published as Lync Server 2010 launch book for the DACH region by Microsoft. Together with Jochen Kunert (Managing Director of Unify Square EMEA), Daniel co-authored the second book about Unified Communications2. His third book is about Cloud Services3 which was written for the EuroCloud association in Europe and his latest book “Microsoft Lync 2013 Unified Communications: From Telephony to Real Time Communication in the Digital Age”4 was published internationally in 2013. Additionally, he has a couple other publishing projects inclusive of whitepapers for Microsoft, Gartner, Formicary Collaboration Group and others. Daniel is a regular speaker at international events and congresses like EuroCloud Congress Western Europe, Microsoft Lync and Skype Conferences, Microsoft Global Exchange US, TechEd, Enterprise Connect, Microsoft Product Launches, University and campus events and also contributes to technical articles, business magazines and newsletters in Microsoft & Lync forums. In his free time, he spends time with Aikido, Iaido, Kendo, Ken-Jutsu, Kyudo, Meditation and other activities.