Today 3/10/2019 We have added Jeremy Needle as a Co-organizer of the Group and we moved forward with the new name of the group. Now we will call it "Los Angeles Azure and Big Data User Group"

To realize the benefits of cloud: the innovation, the agility and fast iteration speeds, reduced costs and efficiency, we need a plan. Otherwise we risk failures, breaches, higher costs, and will not be able to leverage the innovation that attracted us to cloud in the first place. The purpose here is two-fold:

First is to solve problems related to cloud adoption and big data. My problems, your problem...the community's problems. We look at not only best practices, but also WORST practices. We talk, we drink, we figure this out.

Second is to really understand these technologies: how are they useful, what can they do, what are integration concerns, etc. Whether you are the DBA maintaining data warehouse or the SQL landscape, or the Network Architect managing the firewalls, or the IT Director getting blamed for everything, this group is for you

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The new Leadership decided to rename the group to LACIUG which will conduct its meeting at Microsoft Playa Vista Location. This group is taken over by LAEXUG Foundation and works as a Charity organization. 

We are welcoming any proposed session and past speaker to come up and speak about any interesting Topic which can be related to Cloud and Infrastructure.

We will also conduct Office 365, Active Directory, Windows and Exchange Servers Sessions in the Groups. So encourage your friends and colleagues to join.

We would also welcome if your agenda and you as a speaker to share some interesting discussion.

So let us try to make the community more stronger.

This is the History of the Group!

LA SLUG is a group created so that interaction designers and developers can come together to learn about Silverlight, Expression and creating rich internet applications.

Co-Founder and beloved friend Microsoft Expression Blend MVP Victor Gaudioso passed in April, 2012. 

You can see "Victor's Final Tribute" video here on Brian Laguna's XAML.TV: https://xaml.tv/2012/08/07/victor-gaudioso-final-tribute/ . Over 40 members attended just to watch a .pptx about him and pay their final tributes. At the end of the video, I said (it's difficult to hear me sometimes when I'm speaking freely) "I chose the theme song from "The Gladiator" movie because at the end of the movie, the sister to the Emperor of Rome passed her dead brother to go to Maximus, saying to the crowd "He was a soldier of Rome. Let's honor him. Victor was a soldier of Microsoft. Let's honor him."

David J. Kelley and Brian Lagunas took over all Victor's tutorials and domains and put them on a blog so it will last in eternity. You can find it here: https://victorgaudioso.blogspot.com/ and also every tutorial is on XAML.TV.

David Harris a well known developer, online marketing front man for MGM studios and celebrity blogger over at celebrity gossip page on meetup and has taken over the page to keep the dream alive. He also runs a east coast page dedicated to young aspiring professionals and visits both the east and west coast about 2 times a month. A few other meetups we recommend is ZURB and the Social Media Group Meet in Canada. We have also been able to lock down some great sponsors that have committed both monies and products/services to our members. So the next meeting will be completely paid for!

Code well and clean!

**********Committed Sponsors List**********

SourForge, FamousFix, Microsoft, ComponentOne, CelebrityGossip, Bing, WichitaWebmasters, MSDN, SexTape, JosephHollander, DevExpress, X17Mag, ComponentArt, PureVolume, BustedCelebrity

If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, please simply hit us up with your offer.

Our newest sponsor is the popular celebrity showbiz news site blog ShowbizSpy.com and they are looking for writers that can add technical spin on posts where appropriate. If you are interested in writing for them please visit the sites contact page for more info.