The following is a post from Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of Windows Server & System Center at Microsoft. This post was originally published on In the Cloud.
Every year there are a handful of audiences that I really look forward to seeing, and the 5,000+ IT professionals who attend the annual Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) are among the very best anywhere in the world.
This is a big week for Microsoft: It’s an opportunity for us to show what we’ve learned from operating 200+ cloud services for 1+ billion people – and how that’s helped us build products that enable our customers to deliver the best possible solutions.
In just a bit, I’ll be taking the stage to deliver the opening keynote of MMS 2013, and I could not be more excited. Today, we announced that two new customers – Domino’s Pizza and Xerox– are now using our infrastructure technologies to deliver critical business applications. We also announced several new product and service updates.
Microsoft’s vision to enable our customers and partners to tackle a full range of critical IT issues is something we call the Cloud OS.
A built-for-the-cloud operating system that provides the level of intelligence, automation and orchestration required to manage global workloads that are increasingly large, diverse and demanding. It allows IT pros, as well as the entire tech industry, to move beyond simple virtualization and instead think about how to best transform the datacenter. This puts IT pros in the driver’s seat: Now they can move beyond being implementers and instead act as innovators.
My remarks later this morning will focus on the successes our customers and partners are having using Windows Server 2012, System Center 2012 SP1 and Windows Intune to solve the challenges the IT industry encounters every day. I’ll also talk about how hybrid cloud computing is opening new opportunities for agility and business impact, including the meeting the challenges of BYOD and the Consumerization of IT.
When I see our tools in action, as well as the IT pros all over the world making massive leaps forward with these technologies, I’m amazed at what an exciting time this is in the technology industry. Far from having to work through an IT solution with trial and error, or hope for a roadmap that will shed some light on future solutions, our products are ready now to support the build, deployment and operation of enterprise clouds. These types of innovations empower IT pros to impact their company and their industry every day.
My remarks today won’t just focus on the tools themselves, however. What makes these products so special – and what allows you to have confidence using them – is that they have been crafted by engineers that build, deploy and operate our cloud services, as well as build the products that are delivered to you for use in your datacenter. This kind of technical immersion guarantees that they are optimized for the most widely used Microsoft enterprise workloads, like SQL, Exchange and SharePoint.
Wish me luck on stage, and keep in touch via Twitter (@InTheCldMSFT) or on my blog, In the Cloud, for more from MMS!
P.S. If you’re not here in Las Vegas, you can watch my remarks later today here.