Annemarie Merchant
MCT | Azure Enthusiast | MBA
Tampa, Florida, United States
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Annemarie Merchant is a cloud nerd with a heart for inclusive innovation and a love for helping people understand Azure Fabric and AI without the headache. As a Senior Solution Engineer at Microsoft, she brings nine years of real world experience solving data and AI challenges across Accenture, SHI, TD SYNNEX, and Insight. With an MBA and a mountain of Microsoft certifications, she shows up with the energy of a triple shot espresso and makes complex cloud topics feel fun, welcoming, and totally doable. Her sessions focus on clarity, curiosity, and building technology that lifts people as much as it lifts organizations.
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Microsoft Fabric FUNdamentals!
Discover the essentials of Microsoft Fabric and learn how it brings clarity to your data landscape. Join Annemarie Merchant for an introductory session on Microsoft Fabric Fundamentals, where we’ll explore the core building blocks of this unified platform. You’ll gain a foundational understanding of Azure Data Fundamentals, OneLake, and Power BI, and see how they work together to simplify your data estate. We’ll also touch on how Microsoft Foundry and OpenAI integrate with Fabric to introduce intelligence and automation into everyday workflows. Whether you’re a data professional or simply curious about modern data solutions, this session will provide practical insights and real-world examples to help you get started. Bring your curiosity and learn how Microsoft Fabric can transform the way your organization handles data.
Learn the fundamentals of Microsoft Fabric across Azure, OneLake, and Power BI, and see how Microsoft Foundry with OpenAI boosts technical workflows. A concise technical intro that turns data chaos into clarity for engineers and analysts.
Mastering Microsoft Certifications: A Roadmap for Cloud Professionals
Designed for aspiring and advancing cloud engineers who want to strategically navigate the Microsoft certification landscape. In this session, Annemarie Merchant, an experienced Azure Engineer and Microsoft Certified Trainer, shares her personal journey through a wide range of certifications, including Azure Developer Associate, Fabric Data Engineer Associate, and Power BI Data Analyst Associate. Drawing from real-world experience, she offers practical advice on choosing the right certification paths, preparing effectively for exams, and leveraging credentials to unlock new career opportunities. Attendees will gain insights into how certifications can enhance technical credibility, support career transitions, and open doors to leadership roles in cloud and data engineering. Whether you're just starting out or planning your next step, this session will provide the clarity and confidence needed to succeed in your certification journey.
Navigate Microsoft certification with confidence. Gain practical strategies and insider tips from an experienced Azure engineer to unlock career growth in cloud and data.
Azure for Builders: A Practical Cloud Fundamentals Deep Dive
A practical, beginner‑friendly walkthrough of Azure’s essential building blocks, including subscriptions, resource groups, identity, networking, storage, compute, and security. The session maps fundamentals to real delivery patterns so new builders can choose the right services, deploy confidently, and run foundational workloads at scale.
This session requires no special technical setup and can be delivered with or without live demos. It targets new cloud practitioners, early‑career builders, sales engineers, students, and teams beginning their Azure journey.
Microsoft Data Ecosystem: Practical Introduction
A clear overview of the Microsoft data landscape, spanning Azure Storage, Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, Databricks, Synapse, Power BI, and Microsoft Fabric. The session demystifies ingestion, transformation, modeling, and serving, with a focus on how Fabric unifies the experience and simplifies delivery for analytics and AI teams.
Optional Fabric demo can be included when a workspace is available, but the talk stands on its own. The session is designed for beginners, new data engineers, and business analysts transitioning into technical roles.
Pipeline to Insight: Hands‑On Data Ingest, Transform, and Serve with Fabric
A guided, end‑to‑end walkthrough of data engineering in Microsoft Fabric. Attendees follow the journey from raw ingestion into OneLake, through transformation into gold datasets, and into analytics via Power BI using Direct Lake. The talk highlights schema design, performance tuning, governance considerations, and common pitfalls.
Access to a Fabric workspace enhances the live demo, but the session can run with pre‑recorded flows. The audience includes data engineers, analysts, architects, and technical sellers seeking practical Fabric patterns.
Building AI on AI‑Ready Data with Microsoft Fabric and Foundry
A practical session showing how organizations prepare AI‑ready datasets in Fabric and turn them into applications, copilots, and agent experiences with Microsoft Foundry. The content covers OneLake, Prompt Flow, grounding, evaluation, and safe deployment, with a short demo connecting a Fabric dataset to a Foundry application.
An optional Foundry demo environment is useful but not required. The session targets data and AI builders, architects, solution engineers, and product teams exploring enterprise AI patterns.
OneLake Shortcuts and Mirroring: Reducing Data Movement, Increasing Reuse
A deep technical session on using Shortcuts, Mirroring, and Open Mirroring in Fabric to virtualize and replicate enterprise data into OneLake as Delta tables. Attendees learn how to eliminate duplication, keep replicas in near real time, and enable high‑performance analytics and AI with universal security and Direct Lake.
A Fabric engineering workspace helps demonstrate virtualization and sync workflows, but the session can be delivered as a diagram‑first architecture talk. The target audience is senior data engineers, architects, and Fabric practitioners modernizing data estates.
Governance‑First AI with Microsoft Fabric and Foundry
An advanced architecture session on building AI solutions with governance, lineage, security, and compliance. The content walks through Purview‑driven lineage and sensitivity labels, prompt evaluation workflows, grounding processes, managed endpoints, content safety, observability, and deployment patterns for regulated environments.
A Purview‑enabled environment and a Foundry sandbox are helpful for demos, though the session can be delivered with conceptual flows. The audience includes architects, governance leaders, compliance specialists, and public sector teams.
Identity, Access, and Zero Trust for Data and AI on Azure
A prescriptive guide for securing analytics and AI workloads using Entra ID, managed identities, service principals, private networking, Key Vault, and policy guardrails. The talk covers practical patterns for pipelines, Fabric workloads, and Foundry apps, balancing developer velocity with Zero Trust requirements.
Access to an Azure tenant enables identity flow demonstrations, but the content can be shown with diagrams and code snippets. The audience is architects, security engineers, solution engineers, and AI platform owners enforcing enterprise security.
AWS and Azure Side by Side a Foundational Overview for Cloud Professionals
This session helps Azure practitioners quickly understand AWS by translating familiar Azure fundamentals into their AWS equivalents using clear language and simple comparisons. Although both clouds share the same core building blocks for compute storage networking identity and databases, they use different names and organizing principles that can be confusing at first glance. Attendees learn how Azure Virtual Machines relate to AWS EC2 how Azure Functions map to AWS Lambda how Azure Blob Storage aligns with Amazon S3 and how Azure Disk Storage compares to Amazon EBS.
The session also explains database parallels such as Azure SQL Database and Amazon RDS as well as Cosmos DB and DynamoDB. By the end participants will be able to navigate AWS using their existing Azure mental model understand where the two platforms mirror each other and apply practical examples that make multicloud work feel far less intimidating.
This session requires no special technical setup and can be delivered with or without live cloud examples using free tier AWS resources or an Azure subscription for comparison. It is designed for Azure engineers multicloud curious practitioners' solution architects and technical sellers who increasingly interact with AWS environments.
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Annemarie Merchant
MCT | Azure Enthusiast | MBA
Tampa, Florida, United States
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