About

What is Balestra ?

Balestra is a fencing term, meaning “a quick jump forward”.
It is faster than a step forward, which helps change the rhythm and timing of moves.

And that is what we stand for: helping you make that quick jump forward.

Balestra focuses on Microsoft Office 365 technology and specializes in Governance and User Adoption for collaboration and document management.

About Marijn

Marijn Somers is the founder and owner of Balestra. For over 14 years, Marijn has been active in various roles to help clients deliver successful collaboration and content management solutions. These roles included Project Manager, Presales engineer, evangelist, SPOC (Single-Point-Of-Contact), trainer, analist and administrator.

Recognizing the value of word-of-mouth, Marijn is active in multiple communities. Passionate about technology, you can find him in usergroup meetings both on stage as in the audience. This results in a wide network of contacts with outstanding professionals.

He kept a blog stating all his endeavours in the wonderous world of IT. The result is the website you are reading today which attracts over 200 readers on a daily basis.

Career

Marijn started his professional career at Dolmen where he quickly got inspired by SharePoint technology. Because of the curiosity for optimal user experience and internal/external evangelism he grew into the role of Presales consultant, aiding the sales team in rich demo’s of the SharePoint platform for intrigued customers.

His next role as Microsoft Technology Consultant for British Telecom GS gave him the change to work on his Project Management skills while spreading the S-word at customers such as NMBS/SNCB, Proctor&Gamble, …

Joining the start-up Thysia in the Netherlands proved to be a challenge: carrying SharePoint projects from a to z involved a technical deepdive in the world of IT administration, developer code and the new world of SharePoint 2010.

As SharePoint consultant for Beyond-IT, Marijn dived into the field of Process automation and building applications on the SharePoint platform for chemical giant Yara and bank “Dexia”(now known as Belfius).

Marijn Somers finished his Bachelor degree with honors in “Multimedia and communication technology” from PIH, Kortrijk.