Pat Helland has been working in distributed systems, transaction
processing, databases, and similar areas since 1978. For most of the
1980s, he was the chief architect of Tandem Computers' TMF
(Transaction Monitoring Facility), which provided distributed
transactions for the NonStop System. With the exception of a two-year
stint at Amazon, Helland has worked at Microsoft Corporation since
1994 where he was the architect for Microsoft Transaction Server and
SQL Service Broker. Until September, 2011, he was working on Cosmos, a
distributed computation and storage system that provides back-end
support for Bing. Pat recently relocated to San Francisco with his
wife to be close to the grandchildren and to explore new opportunities
in "Big Data" and/or "Cloud Computing".