Wired Life in the Roanoke Valley

This morning began with the annual herding of IT people into a huge conference center hall for the Keynote address. With so many seats it is amazing that there are people who are still standing – but it happens every year and most of the time those without seats are those without watches (yes, I realize some of you would prefer to sit along the wall).

This year’s keynote entertainment was provided by Christopher Lloyd, “Doc,” from Back to the Future – complete with the Delorean! Great one-liners about Bill Gate’s quote that 640K of RAM was sufficient back in the day – it might have been but apparently not for time travel. Biff and Techfly were the foils (just like the movie) and Bob was dressed like Michael J. Fox – nice wig, Bob. We were treated to a review of Microsoft’s past promises (WinFX) and given a vision of the future (run by the maniacal Microsoft Bob and Clippy). The moral of the story was not to talk about vision but about the real world.

The on-stage presentation was about making an Extreme IT Make-Over with Doc serving as an official MS BS detector, preventing Bob from drifting into vision speak.

This year’s keynote speaker was Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s Senior Vice President of Server and Tools Business. While it was unfortunate that Steve Balmer wasn’t the presenter (he is always hilarious), Bob certainly had a lot to talk about.

[The following are running - unedited notes - from the presentation]

Bob described our challenges as stemming from the 70/30 split – meaning that 70 percent of IT budget goes to maintenance, while 30 percent goes to new initiatives. To meet these challenges, Bob stated that Microsoft wants to serve as a partner to our businesses for 5, 10, and even the next 50 years. Microsoft’s current push is through the use of several optimization models – Core Infrastructure, Business Productivity, and Application Platform. These models drive the initiatives that Microsoft has currently (DSSI, Dynamic Systems Initiative, .Net, and Trustworthy Computing.

Four new areas of technology innovations provide Microsoft’s vision for the future: Unified and Virtualized, Process-Led and Model Drive, Service-Enabled, and User-Focused. Bob highlighted these new innovations using a video about Energizer (although I am not completely sure how the video fit into Bob’s presentation – it didn’t seem to have much to do with what he was speaking about at the moment). Bob then brought Tom Bittman, VP and Chief of Research, at Gartner on stage to talk about the industry’s shift to “dynamic.” Dynamic, according to Tom, means a push for IT to be more agile – connections are becoming pervasive, response time expectations are shrinking, and relationships are online and short-lived. These changes mean that our windows of opportunity are shrinking, so agility is becoming a business differentitator. IT matters because it can assist the business in being more agile and cost-effective. Agility means the ability to detect a change in the environment and then do something about it with speed and efficiency. All elements of an organization must be agile as one single element that is not agile can bring the system (business) down. Agility requires removing barriers between business, infrastructure, and applications.

Attaining agility is difficult because we see that 70 percent of IT budgets are spent in maintaining current (and overly complex) environments. It cannot be measured by Quality of Service, or by uptime, but these have ultimately proved to be untrue. If IT cannot provide business agility then it really becomes a cost center and makes outsourcing more attractive. The effective business will combine agility, quality of service, and economics. To measure agility we should be asking our customers what it means – and then making that happen.

How do we get there? We can use the IT maturity model. CMM developed in 1987 is the core of the concept and it indicated that you must focus on process in order to get things right. Gartner believes that you must focus on process, technology, and culture. Some things that IT can do to work to this is to break big projects into smaller ones so that they don’t fail due to project-bloat (cost and failure to achieve agility). The bottom line is that agility is becoming a differentiator and that it is essential for IT moving forward.

Bob returned to the stage to continue to speak about Microsoft’s push for dynamic IT. The first foundation for this is federation – the ability to do things together – with ourselves and our customers. Security is another foundation so that we can protect data. Finally, interoperability is the last foundation of the new dynamic environment. Interoperability at Microsoft is based on products, community (licensing IP), standards (e.g. XML), and access (ease of licensing). Bob then announced that Zandros has just taken a license for Microsoft’s IP.

Microsoft sees the future in virtualized environments – within 5 years most applications will be running in a virtual environment. Microsoft has made several key investments in this area. System Center is an area of focus because it can manage both the physical and virtual worlds. We then saw a demo of Windows 2008 server core and System Center. Server core is a minimal installation of the OS that allows the creation of a server that is only configured for the roles you have chosen. The server core is a CLI based installation. Windows Server virtualization allows the use of quad-core virtualized environments with tons of memory (the demo had 6GB). System Center can be used to combat virtual sprawl. SC allows for simplified conversion of VMware machines to Microsoft virtualized machines and the placement of the newly created machines on the most available physical server. The demo also included quick migration – which is similar to VMWare’s Live Motion. The last part of the demo involved using System Center to manage a virtualized IIS farm. After noticing that the CPU on some of the web servers was high, System Center was used to create a new instance of a Virtual machine and add it to the web farm to reduce the load on the entire farm – this work took just a handful of clicks.

Bob indicated that Windows 2008 will ship later this year but the virtualization piece will ship about 6 months after the OS release.

Microsoft is also investing some effort in bringing business analysts, developers, and IT Professionals together to synthesize business and IT processes. Microsoft wants a cohesive solution to capture knowledge and drive consistency by using models (e.g. SML). Models can be used to drive down IT costs and make our work more efficient.

Another demo was offered to show some of the model-based applications that are used today. in System Center 2007 several applications were modeled in an end-to-end fashion. System Center allowed an easy drill down to diagnose and correct a monitored application that failed. The services can be defined in a way that suits every environment and modeling facilitates this.SQL server can also be managed with System Center. In this way, IT Pros and developers have a single, consolidated, tool to manage applications that have been modeled.

Service enabled applications are needed to develop the systems of the future. ,NET has been the tool to develop these new service enabled applications. Going forward, services will augment this environment and applications will be able to extend their reach.

Another demo provided insight into new application design using BizTalk server. We were shown how to service-enable an application using BizTalk. Then a report was run using SQL 2008 Reporting Services and spiced up using recently acquired Dundee  Map. The demo combined legacy and new systems and integrated the physical world (RFID) using BizTalk.

Bob then talked about the focus on user interaction. Microsoft has been putting a lot of work to create ways for developers to deliver rich experiences for their users across a multitude of presentation applications.

Another demo was created using Visual Studio 2008 which includes Visual Tools for Office 3.0. The presenter created an application that interfaced with Outlook to display WPF information when receiving email from sales staff. Further work on the application allowed the ability to drill down into the original application’s information. The Office ribbon was also modified to work with the developed application. The presentation was designed to show the ease of integration between Visual Studio 2008 and the existing Office 2007 products.

Bob moved straight into another demonstration of Silverlight. Silverlight can be used to build rich web-based applications. We saw multi-movie displays in a variety of browsers (including Firefox) and how easy it is to install Silverlight. A demo chess application pitted .NET against Java and, needless to say, .NET won.

At this point I left the Keynote so that I would not be late for the next session – the Keynote was already 5 minutes over its planned time.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 10:21 am and is filed under Microsoft, TechED, TechED 2007, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.