This week the annual Microsoft Teched North America convention is being held in New Orleans, Lousiana. The conference kicked off today with a opening keynote by Microsoft president Bob Muglia. Hereunder you will find a comprehensive summary.

Before the annual TechEd North America keynote kicked off in New Orleans, the audience got a treat from a local band perfoming music from artists like James Brown:

The crowd loved it very much. It showed the entertainment that New Orleans has to offer and the origin of the jazz and other music from this city.

Bob Muglia, president Server & Tools Business at Microsoft, started the keynote with the title “Cloud Computing: Changing the Dynamics of IT”. Bob noted that Microsoft started in 2003 with its Dynamic IT vision, a vision that is trying to achieve a fully Dynamic Datacenter. Recentely renamed to Dynamic IT, this 10-year vision, of which we already had 7 years, is even more applicable when we look at Cloud computing and they opportunities for dynamic datacenters we have there.

Dynamic IT has four pillars. The first pillar, Service Enabled, means that we need to think in Services, not servers anymore. The email services is not about a single Exchange Server, but about everything from the antispam functionaly on the web, the Edge Server in your DMZ, to the Backend Mailbox server and the dependant services. In this vision, products and solutions should be Service Enabled and focused.

The second pillar, User Focused, amplifies that we need to focus on the enduser, not the device. The user needs its applications, profile and data to do his or her work, no matter the location. Tools and products should focus on delivering these securely to the user at any context/device (fi: VDI, full desktop, kiosk, etc).

The third pillar, Process-Led Model-Driven, outlines that there is a need for models. One definition of the “what” so all systems can work with this information and unify management. No more disperate databases or repositories, but one single way of exchanging information between (management) tooling.

The last and fourth pillar, Unified & Virtualization, means that we need to virtualize on every layer. Not only hardware virtualization or application virtualization (for which Microsoft has solutions today with Hyper-V and App-V), but also ‘model virtualization’. Model virtualization means that we will describe the “service” and have tooling deploy/manage based on that. More on this later in this article with SCVMM vNext.

Stephanie Cuthbertson was asked to stage to demo “end-to-end operations”. She demonstrated, based on a sample aviation company called Blue Yonder, how Visual Studio 2010 assist in Intelligent Tracing.

She also showed the new Visual Studio 2010 Lab Center that works together with System Center and Hyper-V to easily create a (temporary) test environment to deploy the application to for testing.

Stephanie switched to System Center to demonstrate that Operations Manager monitored the application from end-to-end, simulating logons to the website, as well as component monitoring for the website, databses, etcetera.

She demonstrated how the Opalis automation engine, part of the System Center suite as of late last year, could deploy the new web application to production hands-off, fully based on an automated runbook.

After this, Bob dove into Cloud computing and how it will change the way we do IT fundamentally. Microsoft sees five fundamental aspects to Cloud and Bob took the next 30 minutes to outline them.

Just-in-time provisioning

The first fundament is the way we deploy servers or datacenters. With Cloud we can achieve just-in-time provisioning for the required resources and only paying for what we use, enabled significant cost savings and enterprise scaling. Bob asked Anders Vinberg, a technical fellow at Microsoft, on stage to demonstrate an early build of the next version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

The build on the screens showed that Anders was using SCVMM version 2011, technical preview. The new SCVMM focuses on cloud-enabled scenario’s. Anders showed a list of items like OS images and Server Applications as App-V packages. They could be combined in a profile that would then be deployed by SCVMM as a server, part of perhaps a larger service.

On this latest topic, SCVMM adds a Service Designer. Anders showed an UI where he could click a Service profile (3-node HA) and he could drag and drop the application and server profile to the different nodes. The UI also exposed networking elements, hinting at integration for managing networks with this respect.

The last thing he showed was how the environment could be kept compliant. Anders showed that the OS image could be inspected and non-compliant images could be patched offline before applying them into production again. The screens also showed Xen Server integration and support.

While this would be mainly targeted to Cloud on-premise, Microsoft already offers Cloud services with their Azure platform. Bob talked about SQL Azure (eg: SQL in the cloud) and Windows Azure and Windows AppFabric. Doug Pudy was asked on stage. Based on a Fabrikam shipping example website, he showed how Active Directory on-premise was federated with Azure for the ordering process.

He also showed how developers could leverage .NET framework version 4 to write application to could be hosted/run in the Azure cloud, providing scale. He demo’d the integration on-premised with AppFabric with the new IIS plugin, and announced the availability of AppFabric as of today. He also announced that there will be a System Center Operations Manager management pack for Azure before year end that will support integrated monitoring of cloud scenario’s and demo’d a prototype on stage.

Bob continued on how succesfully the Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 platform was embraced by customers. He announced the availability of Service Pack 1 for these operating systems next month, and briefly noted that it will also add new features like Hyper-V Dynamic Memory (more info here) and RemoteFX.

Changing the way we work

The second fundament to cloud computing is the way it enables/transforms communications and social interactions. Bob noted that Microsoft already hosts 40 million customers in their BPOS offering, which is their online Exchange and online Sharepoint.

Gurdeep Singh Pall was asked on stage to talk about Microsoft’s new collaboration server, Office Communications Server version 14. Gurdeep primalery focused on the new Communicator client. He showed the new layout and the fact that it integrates with (people) pictures from Sharepoint. The new interface shows a simple layout for communication history, voicemail integration with Exchange (UC) and ofcouse the fact that it can act as a softphone for voice communications.

New features that OCS 14 and Communicator 14 will have are for instance that we can find people based on their skill set. They can either populate this themselves in Sharepoint, or have the new Sharepoint engine determine – based on the documents your read/write/etc – what your skills are. Another great feature is that you can do video conferencing at high resolution (HD 720p) in the Communicator client. Gurdeep performed a HD video conversation with a co-worker and showed the high quality, but also the ability to do things you previously only could do in Livemeeting: toegher work on a whiteboard, and share a Powerpoint presentation.

Smarter devices for the cloud

The third fundament to cloud computing is that the cloud needs smarter devices to unleash all the “power” of the cloud. Augusto Valdeze was asked on stage and showed the new Windows Phone 7 operating system. He showed the ‘hubs’ that differentiate between for instance work and private life. He quickly noted that v7 will have sync support for more than one Exchange profile! In the contacts section Augusto showed the integration with Facebook and Windows Live contacts.

Another key aspect was the Office and Sharepoint integration of Phone 7. Augusto showed an email with a link to Sharepoint that, once clicked on the phone, opened up a mobile Sharepoint client which had support for browsing document lists etc for a small screen like the phone. He opened up an Excel document, edited it, and saved it back to the server.

After that, Bob announced that Internet Explorer 9 will have HTML5 support and is currently available in a platform preview version. He also outlined that Microsoft is working on Windows InTune. A Cloud service that enabled management for PC’s from the cloud, and is currently available as a beta to selected participants, and provides inventories, software deployment and other features.

Data and the Cloud

The fourth fundament to cloud computing is data integration and standardization.

Amir Netz was aksed on stage. He started with a demo of Excel 2010 and the new PowerPivot add-in that delivers integrated Business Intelligence capabilities. He loaded data with 200 million rows of data and showed that PowerPivot could instantly sort, filter, etc. Amir also showed that PowerPivot and Office 2010 can take advantage of the Cloud by being able to connect to SQL Azure as a datasource.

He showed the fact that these PowerPivot projects can be saved to Sharepoint 2010 in a PowerPivot gallery. Amir continued on to show “Project Dallas” where Microsoft is defining a standardized format called OpenData, adding in data from the UN to his Excel workbook. The last thing he showed was the Bing Maps SDK that he could use to project his data on a map and integrated with a new Windows Live service to graphically work with the data.

Opportunities and responsibilities

The fifth and last fundament to cloud computing is that it both creates opportunities and responsibilities. Bob emphasized that Microsoft is not confused and acknowledges that the data in the cloud is yours, and that they have an obligation to protect and secure it.

Tony Scott, CIO of Microsoft Corp, was asked on stage to share his experiences with Microsoft IT adopting cloud. He started with the fact that a key design principle for new services at MSIT is to first look at Cloud to provide the services. He talked how they internally used Windows Azure to move several applications out of their MSIT datacenters, to the Azure Cloud.

Bob ended the keynote by adressing the audience that times are fundamentally changing. He noted that while it will mean that some services will be provided by Cloud, IT Pro’s and Developers should not fear and look at the new opportunities the Cloud provides for their work and business. He asked everyone to consider thinking about Cloud when looking at commodity/standardized services like email and start there for moving to the Cloud.

Conclusion

TechEd North America had an amazing keynote this year with Microsoft’s top speaker Bob Muglia. Bob was able to clearly tell how Microsoft is “all in” with the Cloud and what five fundaments its see to Cloud adoption. With all the demonstrations Microsoft was able to show that it is able to execute on that vision and deliver Cloud services for enterprise today. The most impressive part is the integration on all fronts: between Windows/SQL and Azure and between Virtualization and System Center. This will be a very interesting week in New Orleans

– Maarten Goet (MVP)