1. VMware Gets Props From TechEd Attendees
VMware’s booth was situated on the periphery of the TechEd show floor, but the company wasn’t far from the minds of show attendees. VMware’s vSphere 4 won the Best Of TechEd award in the virtualization category, and it also won the Attendee’s Pick award as the product rated highest by TechEd attendees across all categories.
“The big thing we’re seeing now is customers actively pursuing a Microsoft virtualized server environment,” Dai Vu, director of virtualization solutions marketing for Microsoft, told CRN in an interview at TechEd. “Even if customers have traditionally invested in VMware ESX, they’re now deploying Hyper-V to those environments.”
2. Microsoft’s New Server & Cloud Division Paying Off
Microsoft last December underwent a re-organization that included the formation of a new Server & Cloud Division (SCD) that united the Windows Server & Solutions and Windows Azure groups.
3. The New Mantra: Multi-Tenancy
Microsoft recognizes that its products haven’t traditionally been designed with hosting partners in mind, but that’s now one of the company’s top priorities. “Our products were not designed to be multi-tenant, and hosting partners have struggled with how to deliver solutions to customers,” Muglia said at TechEd.
4. Microsoft Uses Humor In Mobile Mea Culpa
In a TechEd session on Windows Phone 7, Terry Myerson, corporate vice president of Windows Phone engineering, showed a Microsoft marketing spoof video to convey his surprise with being asked by Steve Ballmer to leave his post as general manager of Exchange and lead the Windows Phone group’s development efforts. “Wait, you’re not serious, are you?” Myerson says in the video. “Steve, this is [extremely] nuts!”
In the video, Myerson quickly realizes that Microsoft’s mobile OS has a perception problem with end users and that the company’s marketing data is hopelessly outdated.
Microsoft’s message to TechEd attendees: We know we allowed Windows Mobile to become irrelevant by not paying attention to what today’s users want, but we’ve seen the error of our ways and are going to fix the situation.
“The phone has become in many ways the most personal computing platform we all have, and we need to adapt Windows Phone to be that way,” Myerson said in the session.
5. Microsoft Not Shy About Pointing Out Cisco’s UC Flaws
“Cisco is trying to stretch into the UC market by buying a lot of companies. They’re taking all these different workloads and saying, if you squint at it, it’s UC. But there’s nothing unified about it,” Singh Pall said.
