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Gabriele Castellani is Technical Evangelist Management at Microsoft. His background spans Web Development, Enterprise Software Architecture, Cloud Software Architecture and Modern App development.

Gabriele Castellani started working in IT more than 17 years ago; he founded his own company in 1995 called Leonardo Da Vinci Engineering Srl while he was studying for Computer Engineering in Florence. The primary focus of the company was on custom development and was of the first companies specialized on web development. In 1999 he moved to Milan and joined mondadori.com startup as developer and trainer the startup was founded by one of the biggest editorial group in Italy. Mondadori at that time was also the biggest IT Training Center, driving the biggest IT conference in Italy called WPC. During this timeframe, Gabriele started to deliver technical session and keynotes at WPC and he still is a keynote speaker after 14 editions.

In 2001 he joined Microsoft as Technical Lead for msn.it and he could apply his knowledge about Web Architecture on msn.it portal working on the content management system with focus on editorial partnership. Around 2003 he joined the newly created Developer & Platform Evangelism Group where he covered several roles until now. He started as ISV Developer Evangelist where he have been accounting major ISVs in Italy helping them to develop new opportunities leveraging the Microsoft platform, modernizing their application.

In 2007 he became Developer & ITPro Evangelist Manager being responsible for marketing and evangelism activities inside DPE. In this role he delivered the first Italian Live HD streaming event. In 2011 took the role of manager of the ISV and Partner team working with Evangelist and PAM driving the engagement of the first wave of Windows Phone, Windows 8 and Cloud app developers. Today he is Director Technical Evangelist Management being responsible of the evangelism activities and the startup ecosystem driving them around the new waves of innovation and still leading the ISV Board inside Microsoft Italy .