Microsoft names around 4,000 MVPs worldwide: Two of them work at Informotion
Every year, Microsoft decides who keeps the Most Valuable Professional title and who loses it. Around 4,000 people worldwide make the cut. A little over 100 of them are in Australia, and two of those work at Informotion: Andrew Ly and Andrew O’Young.
The MVP award is not a certification. Nobody sits an exam, and there is no way to buy in. A candidate must be nominated by a Microsoft employee or an existing MVP, then stand up to a review of a full year of evidence: conference talks, published guidance, open-source contributions, and the unglamorous hours spent answering other practitioners’ questions. The title expires after twelve months. Keep contributing, developing and delivering … or hand it back.
That makes the MVP award one of the few claims of expertise in this market a customer can check for themselves. It is Microsoft’s own verdict, delivered annually, on who is genuinely shaping and expanding new and innovative ways how its technology gets used.
Meet Informotion’s Microsoft MVPs
Andrew Ly
Nine-time Microsoft MVP, Business Applications. Six-time FastTrack Recognised Solution Architect.
Andrew has held his MVP award nine years running, in the Business Applications category, which fewer than 500 people worldwide can claim. He specialises in Microsoft Power Platform, Power Apps and Dynamics 365, and brings more than 25 years of Microsoft delivery to helping organisations rebuild slow, manual processes as modern business applications.
His FastTrack Recognised Solution Architect title does a different job to the MVP. FTRSA comes from Microsoft’s engineering organisation, and it is earned on delivery: published reference architectures and customer implementations that Microsoft’s own architects have pulled apart and approved. Around 170 architects worldwide hold it. Microsoft calls it the highest recognition it gives a solution architect, and Andrew has earned it six times.
“I’ve been fortunate to learn from a lot of talented people throughout my career, so contributing back to the Microsoft community feels like a natural part of the job. The real value of the award is the access that comes with it. I spend time with the product teams and see where AI/Copilot, Power Platform and Dynamics 365 are heading, and that goes straight into the advice our customers get.”
-Andrew Ly, Al Business Process Capability Lead – Microsoft Cloud and Al, Informotion
Andrew O’Young
Three-time Microsoft MVP, Security and M365
Andrew holds MVP awards in two categories at once, Security and M365, with a specialisation in Microsoft Intune. Across more than a decade of consulting he has helped organisations strengthen their security posture and modernise how their people work in Microsoft 365.
He is also one of the busier community builders in the Australian Microsoft scene, contributing through user groups, events, podcasts and technical sessions. In 2026 Microsoft went a step further and selected him as a Regional Leader in the Microsoft Global Community Initiative, joining a hand-picked global cohort trusted to grow technical communities in their regions.
“The Microsoft community connected me with the people and opportunities that shaped my career, so the MVP award and the MGCI role are a chance to give some of that back. It works in both directions, too. Whatever problem a customer’s project runs into, if I don’t have the solution or answer, someone in that network has usually seen it before, and I know who to ask.”
-Andrew O’Young, AI Workforce & Security Capability Lead – Microsoft Cloud & AI, Informotion
What this means when you work with us
The value of an MVP on your project comes down to access. MVPs work under a non-disclosure agreement with Microsoft, testing preview builds months before general availability and sitting in briefings at the annual MVP Summit in Redmond that never leave the room. They also hold direct lines to the engineers who build the products. So when your project hits a product limitation or an undocumented behaviour, the question goes to the person who wrote the feature rather than into a support queue. Advice given today already accounts for what Microsoft will ship in six months, which keeps you from building something the platform is about to make redundant.
None of it is self-assessed, either. MVP status is re-judged by Microsoft every year against fresh evidence, and FTRSA is granted for real customer implementations that Microsoft’s architecture team has examined line by line. Together they amount to an outside audit of what our people know and what they have shipped, done before you have read a single page of a proposal.
The questions we hear most
Most conversations with us start in one of a few places: where to begin with Microsoft Purview, which AI use cases deserve to go first, or how to get more from an existing OpenText Content Manager data. If any of those sound familiar, talk to the team. The advice comes from people Microsoft re-checks every year.