I won the Digital Revolution Award 2023

Normally I don’t like to post personal things on this blog, but this time I need to do an exception because I think that I probably will remember this month for the rest of my life…

Two weeks ago I was an invited speaker in Slovenia to the DynamicsMinds conference and during the conference the committee organized a community recognition for categories assigning an award to the people that most influenced the community during the last year. The winner for Dynamics 365 Business Central was… me! Extremely surprised and exciting to receive the award directly from a myth like Microsoft’s Dona Sarkar:

This was absolutely a great honor for me, expecially because it comes from the opinion of the Microsoft’s Business Applications community. Huge thanks to everyone!

During the last day of this conference, I also received a communication that I was in a global shortlist for an internation award like the Digital Revolution Award. This is an international, cross-vendor and cross-platform award (for companies and for individuals), where you can be nominated if you do something great in the cloud world. I was selected to be in the global shortlist for the Microsoft ecosystem contributions and one of the 5 candidates for the Tech Star of the Year award.

That was another very big surprise for me. Being in a shortlist with big international names in the cloud and digital industry was exciting. That was another big win…

On June 2 there was the official online ceremony for this award (live streamed globally), where the judges (coming from different big vendors of the IT industry, not only Microsoft) reveal the winners of the different categories.

Here you can see a part of this ceremony (sorry for the first 8 seconds of black):

Can you imagine my surprise seeing this?

My reaction was just… WOW! Is this really true??

Winning the Digital Revolution Award is for me a big surprise and a big honor.

I know I was nominated time ago for this award and just having a nomination was for me a sign that my activities in the cloud world are appreciated. Being in the global shortlist was the first great surprise. I was confident to have done a lot in the last year expecially in the cloud ecospace, and having reached the global shortlist was just like a win for me.

But now knowing that I’m the winner of this award is simply something unbelievable.

I don’t know how to describe how I feel right now. I am happy and honored to have received this award, for me it is a great emotion and an incentive to continue in everything I am doing with even more energy. I’m particularly proud of this expecially because it comes from judges that spans many vendors and many technologies, so a lot is out of my standard “Microsoft’s confort zone”.

Thanks… Thanks… I’ve no words to express how I feel right now.

There are a lot of people that I would like to thank for this award and probably someone will be forgotten. A big thank you for who permit me to do these activities, a big thank to Microsoft (expecially Giuseppe Russo) that believe on me from a lot of year and permits me on having a strict collaboration, a big thank to my company and my manager that always support me on extra-work activities and a big thank to my family that gives me energy every time.

Last but not least, a big thank to all the cloud community, to all the Microsoft’s Azure community and to the (smallest but not less important for me) Dynamics Business Central community (love you).

I’m really on paradise now… and it will probably take a few days to realize what happened.