Steve Beaumont has worked for more years than he cares to admit within IT, starting with desktop support. He is now the technical director of PowerONPlatforms and an MVP within the System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management group, where he helps organizations realize the benefits of the hybrid cloud. He is the coauthor of Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager Cookbook and System Center 2012 Orchestrator Cookbook. He maintains his own blog at http://systemcenter.ninja. It covers all System Center components and areas related to desktop design, deployment, and optimization.His passion for everything about System Center and IT systems management reflects through all areas of his work, presentation, and day-to-day life in the form of new and innovative solutions brought to the market by PowerONPlatforms. Jonathan Horner has worked in the IT industry for over 25 years. Starting his career at a small consultancy company, he took up many diverse roles, from implementing PC rollouts to running the infrastructure for a major online supermarket.For the last 14 years, Jonathan has been using multiple versions of System Center to help with his tasks. Over many of these years, he specialized in Operations Manager and gained expertise in writing custom management packs for specialized solutions, using many authoring tools along the way.He was one of the earliest people to gain an MCSE in private cloud by passing the exams before they were publically released. He is also a qualified MCT and provides training in many areas of System Center.Jonathan now works at Inframon, a specialist in cloud transformation, where he is the head of the support services team. His team provides telephone support on System Center issues as well as remote-managed and remote-hosted System Center solutions for multiple clients. Chiyo Odika is a senior consultant with Concurrency Inc., a US-based IT solutions provider. While at Concurrency, and also prior to joining it, he architected and configured a wide range of System Center deployments, from small single-site deployments to deployments spanning global infrastructures. He has over 8 years of experience in IT, managing systems, and architecting solutions using a broad range of technologies and platforms. Chiyo holds bachelor's and master's degrees in business and information systems, respectively, and holds an ever-growing list of technology certifications. He has a keen interest in strategies to optimize the service delivery of IT to businesses, and he shares his technology experiences with the community through his blogs at http://mrchiyo.com and http://www.concurrency.com/blog/.Chiyo balances a life of passion for business and technology with his passion for entrepreneurship and service leadership. He has cofounded various business endeavors and is involved in nonprofit and other causes that are of interest to him. When he is not working on the latest cloud technologies, you can find him learning about economic theory, analyzing the markets, and following the latest news and strategies about chess. Robert Ryan is an IT professional with over 15 years of industry experience. He works in both public and private sectors to provide third-line infrastructure support across the globe. He is responsible for major technology projects, including server rationalization, virtualization, and messaging. Currently, he is focusing on private cloud deployments using the Microsoft System Centre suite.In his free time, Robert enjoys technology and films. He likes to spend time with his wife, Natalie, and their five children. He is a frequent blogger at http://scnuggets.blogspot.com.
