by Kendall Lougheed, President

Washington, DC.  July 16, 2010

There is nothing like the World Partner Conference when it comes to BIG. Microsoft does it all very big with 9,500 partners and 3,500 employees.  The 20,000-seat Verizon Centre was home to our daily fireside chats.  The Convention Center that covers 6 city blocks over 4 floors was the nucleus of our countless show and tell sessions.   So what really happened?  Read on for my report as one of the many partners who made the pilgrimage.   

Cloud Computing

Cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud.  This was Microsoft’s main message to partners this year. Cloud replaces local servers, network management, and expensive communications infrastructure, and rids us of our unruly IT staff. Is it that simple? No, because system integration is hard to achieve, even with the latest suite of Microsoft products.    

My take is that the cloud may have immediate attraction for companies wanting to minimize cost rather than gain deep integration between applications.  Microsoft offers Windows Azure as the new universal platform for all cloud services and operating systems including those of its rivals.  So is IT going to become a commodity, or are companies going to continue to make investments that enable their critical market differentiators?

SharePoint

SharePoint is Microsoft’s most successful product ever! Microsoft announced that SharePoint reached $1B in sales faster than any other product and the $2B mark will be hit this year.  The new SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010 are more tightly integrated than ever and I have to admit that this is going to be really big when it comes to document management, enterprise content management, and collaboration.  Our own Information Management team is very excited and also very, very busy with it.  SharePoint happens to figure prominently in our business.  Our goal is to build the best knowledge repositories and SharePoint does a great job when it comes to being practical and easy to adopt – assuming you started with good architecture. 

Unified Communications

Microsoft has set its sights on unified communications - coming out with version 14 this Fall. UC will allow people to communicate over any combination of phone, desktop (with or without audio/video), and mobile device. UC includes white boarding, conference calls, voice messaging integrated with Exchange Server, a thick client or a thin client.  My personal prediction is that UC will become the battleground for the epic fight between the two titans Microsoft and Cisco. Round one has Cisco owning the domain of infrastructure and telephony while Microsoft owns the desktop. Who will win the next round?

Mobile Devices

One thing about Microsoft is that they don’t give up.  After many years of struggling against Apple and RIM for market share, Microsoft is coming out with Windows Mobile 7 this Fall. I have a collection of Windows Mobile devices that I abandoned, mostly because of battery drain or a hung device, especially the 802.11-supported devices.  The promise of a killer device is big, so let’s see.