Apologies to Partners

It has recently come to my attention that some of the partners who attended my session at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver, Colorado last Tuesday were less than pleased with one of the slides I selected in my presentation entitled: Adding a Security Offering to Your Business . I wanted to sincerely apologize to everyone with regards to my slide choice for an example of "good marketing". It was not my intention to offend any of our wonderful Microsoft Partners, whom I've come to know and love in my 8 years at Microsoft, including being a charter member of Microsoft's wildly popular and successful TS2 Seminars Program. The slide was merely a poor attempt at using humor to illustrate a concept.

I take my role as a Sr. Security Strategist within Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing team very seriously. As I mentioned during the presentation, I am absolutely not a "Sales Guy" and choose to discuss topics at business level. I hold the position of Trusted Advisor to be crucial to the success of the security profession, whether you're selling Microsoft solutions or PTZ cameras to monitor your building's perimeter. The tenets of security are unchanging, and security is about far more than selling. It's about providing protection to someone or something. If you attended the session expecting to hear someone from Microsoft tell you how to Sell! Sell! Sell!, then you and I both got some bad info when were asked to attend this session. For those in attendance, I sincerely hope that my passion for this field was conveyed and that you left with a few new things to consider, that you couldn't just read on the MS Partner website. I spent a majority of my adult life in the 75th Ranger Regiment, jumpmastering C-130s for night jumps and leading my squad/platoon/company in live-fire exercises. I know what security is about, and what it is not about, and I've seen what can happen when it's not provided adequately.

Again, sincerest apologies for the use of the slide and I hope that the good far outweighed the bad. I look forward to seeing, and especially hearing from, all of you at the various security conferences around the world. I appreciate all the hard work that you guys do out there in the field and please don't hesitate to contact me directly if you feel that I've erred in any way.

Still spreading the Partner Love,

- Kai