Alex Simons
Corporate Vice President for Identity Program Management, Microsoft
Alex Simons is corporate vice president for identity program management in the Microsoft Cloud + AI Group. He’s responsible for strategic planning, product roadmap, and feature definition for Azure Active Directory and the Microsoft account service as well as Windows Server Active Directory, Active Directory Federation Service (ADFS), and Microsoft Identity Manager, products and services used by over 20 million organizations and one billion monthly active users worldwide.
A career Microsoft employee, Alex joined the company as an intern in 1992 as a partner evangelist for Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Upon returning full time in 1993, he worked as a product manager on Microsoft Home products, such as Encarta, Bookshelf, Dinosaurs and Automap. He then transitioned to program management working on the MSN online content services. While working in MSN, Alex led the incubation of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, serving as its first product unit manager. After seven years running the CRM business, Alex moved to the Windows Division, where he led the re-engineering of the group’s development practices and engineering systems. He joined the Identity Division in January of 2012.
Alex has a degree in marketing and strategic management from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and is a self-taught computer programmer. He lives in the Seattle area with his family and spends all his spare time coaching high school girls in competitive volleyball and doing some occasional gardening.
