We’ve has been busy for the last couple of month’s putting together the Architecture Track for TechEd North America 2013 in New Orleans and TechEd Europe 2013 In Madrid.

There we over 200 presentations submitted to the Architecture track and it took us many hours to sift through the presentations. There were dozens of high quality presentations submitted by experienced and high-regarded speakers from all over the world. In the end, we concluded with 11 presentations for TechEd North America and 9 presentations for TechEd Europe. Between the two venues we have a total of 14 speakers, which includes 12 from Microsoft and 2 non-Microsoft presenters.

Our goal for TechEd 2013 is to improve our track scores and attendance numbers over those from the last three years through hard-hitting and compelling presentations that excite and motivate the audience to architect solutions around Microsoft’s four core pillars in cloud computing. Our animating principle is customer-centric quality performance that inspires and enables you to adopt Microsoft cloud solutions.

STB Priorities Drive the TechEd Architecture Track

We have worked closely with lead architects in the Microsoft Services division to come up with key descriptions of the major areas of coverage, which align to Microsoft STB priorities. The TechEd Architecture (ARC) track will cover the following topics to prepare our customers for the rapidly evolving datacenter services and applications landscape.

MODERN DATACENTER: The “modern” datacenter will support applications that span on-premises and off-premises providers while solving management, identity and data security issues. This datacenter will be scalable and elastic, which will make IT more agile and responsive. The use of shared pooled resources will improve utilization and cost efficiency. Continuously available services will be norm, where there is no tolerance for outages or even maintenance windows, and automation and self-service will “take the work out of the job” by reducing manual tasks and enabling self-service for data center resources.

MODERN APPLICATIONS: Modern applications will need to be able to consume these modern datacenter resources by being able to scale, both up or down. They will need to be flexible and easy so that they can get to market quickly. Applications in the future will be able to integrate seamlessly in the new hybrid IT environments, and will address the realities of a dynamic development lifecycle that will allow you to improve services in near real time.

INSIGHTS ON DATA: These applications will tap into large data stores to provide insights never before possible as we enter the era of “Big Data”. The universe of data is expanding at an exponential pace and this will provide even more value to the modern applications of the future. This value will be delivered by providing users an immersive experience with their data, so that through visualization, they can see patterns, trends, and inflection points they would not have ever been able to in the past.

PEOPLE-CENTRIC IT: These changes in the data center and application development are coincident with the “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) trend. IT will be expected to provide a personalized experience on a wide variety of devices so that users can get work done in a secure fashion regardless of device and form factor.

In order to succeed in this world you will need to place increased emphasis on a well architected approach in all of these areas. This increases the importance and influence of the IT and Application Architect. Sessions in the architecture track provide logical building blocks for this evolution that integrate core platform capabilities that architects can include in their work. These sessions will be delivered by experienced industry experts who will share best practices around the skills of creating, communicating, and improving architectural artifacts for building future state and enabling Microsoft’s Cloud OS vision, with a specific focus on modern applications, leveraging the power of “big data” and enabling users through a people-centric approach to IT.

Presentation and Speaker List for TechEd North America

Presentation and Speaker List for TechEd Europe

Moving Forward – Next Steps

There is still a lot of work to do before we get to New Orleans and Madrid. Some of the things included in our punch list include:

• Meeting with each of the presenters to clarify their messaging and optimize their session descriptions
• Updating session titles and descriptions so that attendees will be able to make informed decisions on participation
• Performing technical reviews of each of the presentations
• Coaching the speakers and perform dry runs with each of the speakers
• Weekly blog posts highlighting each of the presenters and their presentations
• Working with TechEd staff to market our sessions using the TechEd Twitter and Facebook feeds
• Shepherding our speakers though the process prior to and during the events

Stay tuned for more information as our plans progress and we get closer to the BIG EVENT!

HTH,

Tom

Tom Shinder
tomsh@microsoft.com
Principal Knowledge Engineer, SCD iX Solutions Group
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