Last Saturday I arrived in Barcelona for this years IT-Forum event.
Today @ 1400 the keynote started with a percussion session just to warm up the crowd, I and some colleagues where a little late ate the auditorium so the nice people of Microsoft directed us to the press boot so we had priority seating 
The keynote was held by Bob Kelly, he is the Corporate Vice President Infrastructure Server Marketing and he started off with the trends Microsoft is seeing in the market:
• Hardware Performance
• Web 2.0 Explosion
• Software Breakthroughs
• Broadband/Wireless/Mobility Form Factors
After these trends Bob talked about Dynamic IT and its Core Innovative areas, these areas are:
• Unified & Virtualized
In this part Microsoft explained the need of virtualization and the need of standardized environments.
• Process-Led / Model driven
This area is all about being in control using processes in models. Nowadays processes are being more intelligent and to model these processes help us to reduce costs.
This is done in the full range of products from development to operating systems.
• Service enabled
Microsoft is shifting from SOA to SaaS, this allows companies to connect their services, but still is a challenging process to federate between different user bases. Also being compliance with for example SOX can be challenging.
• User-Focused
To enhance the user experience Microsoft is working on developer tools so the developers can build applications with this enhanced user experience.
During the keynote Bob also did some announcements:
• Windows Server 2008 / SQL2008 / Visual Studio 2008 will be launched on Feb. 27th next year. This is a joint launch with a phased product release. This launch will be the biggest launch event ever, split up in 300 events and will have a reach of 15.000.000 people.
• The new virtual server role in Server 2008 (Viridian) has lost its codename and will be called Hyper-V. The server running this role will be Hyper-V Server.
• Next t o Windows Server 2008 there will also be 2 servers for small businesses, called Windows Small Business Server 2008 (75 seats) & Windows Essential Business Server 2008 (300 seats)
• In the summer of 2008 Microsoft will release Microsoft Application Virtualization formally known as SoftGrid.
• Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) will be renamed to Windows Deployment and will be capable to deploy clients as well servers.
There also were a few demos about Windows Server 2008, Virtualization, SQL 2008 and Home Server. I was really impressed by the Virtualization Demo that showed us the ability to use Virtual Machine Manager to manage Virtual Server 2006, Hyper-V and also VMware ESX from one single console.
If you want to see the entire slidedeck please go to our fotolog :
http://fotolog.buit.org/thumbnails.php?album=6
Well I gonna trie to keep you guys posted, talk to you later
Erik Luppes
Viva Barcelona
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