Steve Ballmer: Tech-Ed Brazil

STEVE BALLMER: Tech-Ed, yeah! (Cheers, applause.)

Well, I couldn’t be more excited than to have a chance to be here at Tech-Ed in Brazil. It is an honor, it’s a privilege, and it’s real excitement for me to have a chance to do this event.

I get a chance to do a lot of things when I travel. Most of them require a suit. Tech-Ed probably didn’t. So, I’m glad to be here in what I would call a more natural Microsoft group: developers, developers, developers, and IT pros! Yes, I am glad to be here. Welcome, one and all. (Cheers, applause.)

There’s so much going on in our industry today, and there’s so much to be excited about. I want to have a chance to share a little bit for you some of the things that are on our minds, some of the things that we’re working on, some of the new opportunities that I hope you together with us can really reach out and embrace, because I think they’re going to be very, very exciting.

I’m going to anchor today’s talk in this notion of what we like to call Dynamic IT. Some of us might say, what about IT is not dynamic? It’s constantly changing, constantly moving, constantly being refreshed.

I look out in the audience, and I see people of various ages, various stages in your careers. If you stop and think about how much change we’ve seen, the rise of the PC, the rise of the mobile phone, the rise of the Internet, all amazingly in just the last 15 or 20 years.

And yet as we sit here today in 2008 and look out for the next 10 years, I’ll tell you I’m as excited about the opportunities to make a difference through the development of new software and the deployment of new IT solutions as I’ve been at any time since I’ve been at Microsoft.

People always want to say, whoa, it’s going to slow down. It’s going to speed up, speed, speed, speed, everything changing.

Ten years from now we’ll talk about the primitive days of 2008 before the computer could understand our voice and our intent and what we meant; when we still use to write programs with old fashioned tools like Visual Studio 2008. Of course, by then we’ll have Visual Studio 2018. What a great piece of work I know it will be. And so the pace of change and what we’re all going to enable is going to be quite large.

At the same time, the pressure on all of us to continue to deliver more IT value at less cost is going to remain constant. Particularly I would say for the next few years as the world globally deals with the economic issues that’re in front of us, it’s going to be clear that we’re all going to want to deliver more value and have to be able to prove to our businesses, our clients, our customers that we have constantly less cost.

So, what I want to talk about a little bit today is how we can help overall improve the efficiency and the impact, the value of new software that gets created and deployed in the companies here in Brazil and around the world.

We talk about Dynamic IT as kind of a framework. If you look at all of the companies in the world and you trying to characterize how smart are they, how intelligent are they, how effective are they in their usage of information technology, it really varies quite a bit from a spectrum, from what we refer to as basic IT all the way up to Dynamic IT.

Basic IT: The company treats information technology simply as a cost — simply as a cost, and at all avenues people are trying to reduce cost in a fairly simplistic way, not very thoughtful.

Then you get to what I would call standardized IT, IT as a cost center, but there’s good central control from some kind of IT department or CIO over all of the information technology.

I was talking with Michel Levy about the uniqueness here in the Brazilian market, the huge size of the middle market as a part of the economy in Brazil, middle market companies where you might find just one or two people working in the IT department, working very hard to deliver effective solutions, standardizing the key technologies, and moving up this spectrum from cost center to an efficient cost center, finally to what I might refer to as rationalized IT.

It’s only at a certain phase of sophistication that business says, IT is about something other than providing us with a basic PC and with the basic accounting that we need to run our business. That’s where people start to say, how do we really improve our efficiency, our effectiveness.

All businesses benefit and can benefit through the magic of IT. How is it that a company is going to capture new customers? How do you market on the Internet? How do you more effectively manage your customers and your relationships with your customers through things like CRM? How do you more effectively design new products, manage inventory, deliver new products?

And finally, at the far end of the spectrum is what I think we should all refer to as Dynamic IT. That’s where the business not only views the business benefits of IT, has it well standardized and controlled, but it is also willing and able to move efficiently and quickly to new IT solutions and new IT technologies.

I think that’s where everybody who comes to a Tech-Ed aspires to get their company or their clients. You want your companies to be able to say, we get a lot of benefit from IT, we stay current with the latest and greatest new technologies, and we feel like we’re managing technology at a reasonable cost.

In order to get really to the far right of this spectrum requires great work. It requires great work by companies like Microsoft, but really like all of the people in this room, you must do the kind of work that pushes your business to the far right side of the slide.

You have to understand the business and you’ve got to understand new technologies. When we say virtualization in this room, it means a lot to everybody here, but translating that into the benefit of lower cost and more effective deployment of new solutions, that’s a message we all need to carry and bring forward to the businesspeople who ultimately we all respond to.

So, there’s a vision there, there’s an aspiration: Huge business benefit, dynamically keeping pace with new technologies, and being available at the most reasonable and effective overall cost, where cost includes hardware, software, people, implementation, and the like. And we think we’ve got the technologies in our portfolio to provide you with the tools to drive your organization to the head of this curve, to the world of Dynamic IT.

Today, there are four things I’d like to really talk about in terms of both industry trends and Microsoft solutions that I think are important for Dynamic IT. One is virtualization. Virtualization is a technology that holds great promise for helping improve agility and reduce IT costs.

But there’s a long way to go. Most servers in the world are still not virtualized, and the ability to help you get there and derive the kinds of agility and cost benefits we talked about I want to explain more.

Interoperability and security are fundamental in a world of Dynamic IT. Businesses will only bet more and more of their fundamental operation on information technology if they know two things: One, the underlying technologies are secure; and number two, they need to understand that they have options and choices, and they can take great work that they already have implemented and plug these things together seamlessly.

Third, software plus services. I’m going to talk a lot about this, because I think it’s one of the most important trends going, and it’s an area where Microsoft will lead with new tools and new technologies so that if you want to deploy a solution more quickly, and have it run essentially in a datacenter or a set of datacenters hosted in the Internet, we enable you to get there more quickly.

You may not move every IT solution there immediately, but we think there is a way to dramatically improve the speed with which you deploy new solutions, and lower the cost of those solutions.

And last but certainly not least, at the end of the day most of what people react to when they see new technology is the user interface: How easy is this to use, does it really do what I want it to do?

I’ll tell you a funny story. Every year we get about a hundred leaders of big businesses from around the world to come to Seattle. These are not technology businesses; these are steel companies and banks and telcos and media companies, and they all come I think mostly because Bill Gates invites them and says they can come to his house, but they started coming and we wanted to have a few sessions on technology. Not like Tech-Ed for these business leaders, but just a few sessions to sort of get their views on technology and what it does.

At the very first session the CEO of Citibank puts up his hand and says, I really want to know what the rest of you CEOs want out of technology. I’ll show you what I want. And he actually literally did a demonstration of what we all would call a CRM system that they’d implemented at Citibank, and he was sitting there showing the other CEOs how he could drill in and study the profitability for any account in the Citibank world.

If you stop and think about it, it’s really an amazing story. At the end of the day they didn’t talk about ERPs and cost. Citibank is probably a company that spends over $4 billion a year on IT, and yet the single thing that most motivated the CEO of that large company was the demonstration they could do, the user interface, the real experience, let me show you what it does for me.

And so I want to talk about user experience and user interface, because for all the good work we do, if we want business to appreciate the value of information technology, it’s going to show up in user interface, and there’s a lot of work certainly we’re doing at Microsoft to help propel you forward on that dimension.

Let me start with virtualization. The first thing I think is important to say is the world is still very early in its embrace of virtualization. Less than 5 percent, for example, of all of the world’s servers are virtualized, less than 5 percent.

When we talk about virtualization, there are many forms of virtualization we can talk about. Mostly we talk about virtualizing the server. Increasingly we can talk about virtualizing applications that get delivered from the server. Sometimes you want to run the application all on the server and just virtualize the delivery of the presentation.

At Microsoft, through the work we’re doing in our Terminal Services product, our Desktop Optimization Pack, and the work we’re doing with Hyper-V and System Center, we’re providing a range of virtualization alternatives, from the operating system to the application to presentation.

You want to run everything centrally, you can. You want to control distribution centrally, you can. You want to virtualize just the presentation of a rich client app, we give you the tools to go do that.

But in this world where virtualization the surface has been barely scratched, I think the biggest benefits are going to come from the virtualization of the servers themselves. How do we get more value, how do we get more productivity, but most importantly how do we enable you to deploy new applications without worrying at all about compatibility with old applications?

And with our Hyper-V technology and with our System Center Virtual Machine Manager, both of which have recently launched, we really think we take you an enormous step down this path.

We think we bring an ease of use for you as IT professionals and the kind of low cost that will allow virtualization to literally extend to 90 percent instead of 5 percent of systems.

We host on our hypervisor both Windows systems and Linux systems. Some people think that’s unusual for Microsoft. That’s what I would call an “embrace and extend” strategy. We want you to center your datacenters in our management technology, whether you’re running Windows applications or Linux applications.

Some of you have probably already implemented VMware’s ESX solutions. We provide management tools that allow you to manage not only our own Hyper-V virtual machines but also VMware virtual machines.

So, we think we have the tools here to make virtualization a mainstream part of your datacenters, whether you have one server or up to many, many thousands of servers. We bring this at a low cost, and of course ultimately what’s the benefit of virtualization? You can deploy new applications more quickly, more safely, and in a protected form that allows you to, if you will, more quickly realize the benefits of new application deployment.

For those of you who are developers, we’ve done a lot of work to standardize the distribution formats for our virtual machines, so it’s easy to build an application and then distribute the VSD directly into the datacenters in which people are running Hyper-V and our System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

Rather than just talk about virtualization, I’m going to invite on stage Danilo Bordini, who’s an evangelist with Microsoft here in Brazil, and he’s going to have a chance to show you some of Hyper-V and our System Center virtualization technologies. Welcome, Danilo. (Applause.)

(Demonstration not interpreted.)

(Applause.)

STEVE BALLMER: Not only is that great stuff, but I think Danilo did a beautiful job of bringing it alive to you in many, many ways. Dynamic IT requires an infrastructure that lets you be dynamic in the way you deploy applications and use new system resources.

The second theme I promised I’d hit on in this concept is interoperability. Interoperability is a funny one, because in some senses you’d say every one of the technology vendors should want everything. That’s not practical. The truth of the matter is we know that most IT shops of any size will have a mix, a mix of operating systems, a mix of applications, a mix of development tools, and we need to provide you with approaches that allow you to insert Microsoft technologies and have them work beautifully with what you already own.

Earlier this year, we signed up to a set of principles, documenting what we call our interoperability approach.

Open connections: We want to make sure that people can connect anything they want to the back-end of a Microsoft service, opening up and documenting our protocols.

Data portability: The ability to take information from one system to another. We did a lot of work on the ISO standardization of Open XML as an example of this work.

Support for standards: How many people in the audience are using IE8, just a show of hands? IE8 anybody? It’s a good beta. I encourage more of you to try it. But in IE8 we’ve migrated to support Internet standards much more religiously, and support older Microsoft browsers, IE7 and IE6, through an interoperability approach as we move to embrace Internet standards.

And last but certainly not least is an open engagement with our customers, with industry partners, on the development of new important interoperability approaches.

We run something we call our interoperability council. We have about 20 customers and partners and technology vendors from around the globe asking questions like how do we do a better job, for example, of getting data out of an SAP system and into Microsoft Office, into Excel for analysis or for further work.

So, we continue to work hard on interoperability, because if you’re going to be able to practice Dynamic IT, you’re going to need to be able to do that in the context of everything you own.

We’ll keep trying to convince you why most of the new solutions you want should be implemented on Windows, on Microsoft platforms with Microsoft applications, but we’re going to do a great job of continuing to keep your productivity and efficacy very high by embracing interoperability in a strong way.

The next principle I promised I’d talk about is security, and I want to do that, but I also want to be a little broader.

Windows Server and SQL Server are the bedrock for most of the developers in this audience in terms of how you build server-based applications, the .NET programming interfaces running against Windows Server, pulling data out of SQL Server databases. And with the launch of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 we think we’ve taken an enormous step forward in both of those products in terms of their scalability and their trustworthiness for the biggest, hardest, most complicated jobs in any enterprise.

On top of that with the new Visual Studio tools and everything else that we’ve done, we think we’ve enhanced your productivity, your ability as software developers to more quickly write the important applications and solutions and glue that really keeps the IT shop working.

But if you look at it just in terms of the rock solid foundation, we’ve hardened the platform with these two products. The Server Core technology allows you to skinny down Windows Server so that you’re implementing just what you need for your solution. The work that we’ve done to make the domain controller read only, the high availability clustering solution in SQL Server, data mirroring and resource governance in SQL Server, new compliance, security and governance features, the so-called NAP security features implemented in Windows Server, BitLocker, the ability to use our information and Digital Rights Management software but have those rights be federated with other companies and other environments in your company: A lot of work across the board not only on enhanced developer productivity but enhanced scalability and enhanced reliability and enhanced security.

There is not one job at this stage that I think anybody in this room might want to throw at a server workload that I wouldn’t recommend that you do with Windows Server and SQL Server.

A few weeks ago, I was in Europe. I met with at least three customers in the banking business who are migrating applications off of mainframes onto the Windows Server and SQL Server platform.

We sit with people who are building the largest data warehouses in the world. They’re doing that today with SQL Server.

Fully 60 percent of all the SAP implementations in the world go in on SQL Server, and 75 percent of all the implementations go in on top of Windows Server.

So, the opportunity to drive the productivity benefits of Visual Studio, Windows Server and SQL Server are enormous, and still know that the IT folks can deploy these under the biggest, hardest, most challenging circumstances around, and I think that’s an important sort of breakthrough that we’ve really reached with the newest releases of all of these products.

The next trend I want to talk about from Dynamic IT is the trend to software plus services. You can use any of the following terms, and I think they might mean the same thing, depending on who’s using them: software as a service, software plus service, cloud computing, on-demand computing, grid computing, and there’s probably about 10 other acronyms. Essentially what all of us are referring to is an essential redefinition in the nature of what is software.

Software today really comes from four different heritages. There’s the software that comes from the PC, from the desktop. People love PC software. It’s rich. It’s got the best user interfaces. You control the local software. You can integrate the work between various programs relatively easily; wonderful stuff.

But then there’s the Internet, and the Internet is a whole new world of software. You just click it and it comes down magically from the Internet, and it just runs. It’s not quite as rich. It doesn’t have as nice a user interface. You can’t plug it together. But it’s always there and it seems to integrate with other people and concepts from across the Internet. It too is beautiful.

The server or enterprise software: You like controlling your own applications and your own destiny. We built this application, we monitor it, we manage it, we control it. If anything is wrong with it, we know exactly what we need to do. We maintain the security of our data. People love all of those characteristics, but again it’s almost another island of software.

And last you get software that really is designed today for phones or TVs even as TVs start to move to the Internet. But in the world of the phone people have a whole new world of addresses and contacts and phone numbers, and there’s even an e-mail system called text messaging, which is special for the phone.

Four different worlds of software, of data, and the question is how do we build a new computing model that brings together the best of the desktop, the Internet, the server, and devices, a new distributed computing model, and that really is what we are all talking about under the guise of cloud computing or software plus services or software as a service.

Sometimes people will tell you, no, no, no, what we’re really talking about is returning to the world of the mainframe, everything is centralized except now it’s centralized in the Internet cloud.

I don’t believe in that. I believe in a world in which you’re going to have many things move to the Internet cloud, but you’re going to still want the rich control of the PC, and there’s going to be some corporate data, some corporate processes, some corporate applications you want to take care of.

So, the question isn’t to revert to the old mainframe style programs but now running in the Internet. It’s to evolve to a new model of distributed computing, and that’s what we’re talking about as software plus services.

Many of our competitors are also talking about this, as I said, under different names, but I think we’re actually all moving to a point of agreement: rich software on the client, might run inside the browser and it might not, talking to rich services in the datacenter and in the Internet itself.

So, as we talk about where we’re going, as we have our Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles in a couple of weeks, we’re going to roll out new technologies and a new platform for this software plus services world.

The new platform has a lot of work to do. First, it requires a new platform in the cloud. In the Microsoft kind of way of thinking every new major trend requires a new version of our operating system. So, we did Windows, then we did Windows Server, then we did Windows CE and Mobile. And you’ll see us bring Windows technologies in a new form to the cloud.

The development paradigm has to change. We started that with Silverlight and WPF. How do you take some of the benefits of Windows style development and integrate it directly into the browser so we can use Visual Studio and all the same toolsets to write server applications, client applications and browser applications?

We’re moving to a world of click to run deployment. That’s one of the things people love about an Internet application: You just click it and whatever needs to sort of come down comes down. And through the work we’re doing in .NET and through the work that we’re doing in installation of Windows programs, you’ll see us drive in that direction.

We continue though at the same time to enhance the user experience. We’re not going to say the world is all HTML. With Windows Live, with many of the things we’re doing in the new version of Windows to support touch, the Ribbon user interface, and other advanced UI concepts, the user interface will get richer.

One of the things that I think the Internet teaches us that we need to bring consistently to the platform is what I would call the Web 2.0 style approaches. Everybody uses Web 2.0 to mean something a little bit different, but I think when I’m talking about Web 2.0 here, I’m really talking about this basic notion of user involvement, collaboration, identity, the social graph, if you will.

This is not a service that’s generally available for developers to program against. Yes, if you want to write a Facebook application, you can write an application that runs in Facebook, but if you want to use that kind of information about who knows who, who likes who, who trusts who, and who respects who, and you want to do it in any application that runs in your user experience context that’s more of a business application, those services need to be available as a system construct in Windows Server, in Windows desktop and in Windows in the cloud, and we’ll start to talk more about that.

And then, of course, the business model will be evolving to support these new service-based applications running in the cloud. In addition to transaction models, we’ll see subscription models, and maybe even for the consumer market we’ll continue to see the development of advertising-based models.

So, with this evolution to a new world of distributed computing, we Microsoft will introduce a new cloud platform, some new cloud services around Web 2.0, some advances to our development tools and development runtimes, as well as tools and technologies that really support new business models.

What’s the benefit to all of you as developers and technology people? You want to be able to literally write an application and immediately deploy it. You want to write an application that not only the people inside one company can use but inside multiple companies can use. You want the same programming surfaces and approaches that work today in the enterprise, you want them available in the cloud. You want the ease of deployment of the Web with the richness of the PC. And all of that will enable Dynamic IT in a number of ways.

I don’t think this move to software plus services will happen overnight. I don’t think we’ll wake up one morning and all of a sudden people will have abandoned all prior computing approaches. But it’s our future. It’s the future of our company, it’s the future I think of our industry, and Microsoft will lead, but we’ll lead in a way that brings your experiences with .NET, with Windows Server, with System Center, with SharePoint, with Exchange, with Office. We want to bring all of those talents and education so that everything we do gives you a chance to implement and do something inside the corporation or extending out to this software plus services environment.

This is a big transition, and you’ll see us implement a lot of technologies which are in some senses radical but in many senses will be evolutionary for those of you who are already deeply entrenched with Microsoft solutions.

I thought we’d show you just a little bit of a video of some of the kinds of things that we mean when we say software plus services. The solution that we’re going to show you that was done by a local company here in Brazil, L3, is not a solution that necessarily is built on all of the new technology that we’ll be announcing soon, but I think it shows you a glimpse in how software plus services or cloud computing can help enable Dynamic IT.

So, let’s take a look at the Ew-Risk solution that was implemented by L3 here in Brazil. Roll the video, please.

(Video segment.)

STEVE BALLMER: Great. I want to turn now to the last pillar, and that’s the pillar of rich user experience.

As I mentioned in the story I told you about the leader of Citigroup, people really react to user experience. We can’t miss on security, reliability, scale, correct functionality, but the ability to really give people user interface that lets them do what they expect to do is so critically important to the use of IT. And it’s hard to call IT a strategic business enabler unless it’s really used by people.

I’ll tell you just another small story. I sat next to a man on an airplane a few years ago, and he looked over — I was reading, I don’t know, some computer magazine. That’s when computer magazines were still printed instead of just online, so maybe five years ago. He looks over and he says to me, do you work in the computer business? I said, yes, I do. I got a little nervous. I don’t know how the rest of you are, but I don’t like the idea of being help desk technician for two hours on an airplane ride. But I said, yeah, yeah, I work in the computer business.

He looks over at me and says, well, we have a lot of computers in my company. I got even more nervous, but I said, computers, that’s great. (Laughter.)

So, he says to me, but I’ve got a question for you. I say, okay, here it comes. And I said, well, what’s your question? He says, well, let me first explain my job. My job is setting the price of car insurance in the U.S. state of Colorado. That’s what I do, I set the price of car insurance. And I said, well, that’s great, but we were talking about computers. He said, well, let me finish; let me finish, he says. He says, and I have a theory. My theory is that we should charge a higher price for car insurance for anybody who buys it between Christmas day and New Years. I said, why? He said, who do you think would buy car insurance between Christmas day and New Years except for people who were planning on drinking too much for New Years, and they’re probably less good risks.

And I said, well, that is a very interesting theory, and you’re clearly a very smart man, but what does this have to do with computers? He said, I know that our computers actually know whether I’m right. I know all the information is out there, and I have no idea how to find it, how to get it, and how to analyze it.

It tells you that at the end of the day it is really all about the user experience, and giving people the ability to find, to access, to analyze, and to communicate information, that’s kind of where ultimately Dynamic IT pays off, and we need to have the tools, the tools to build those user interfaces, whether they’re in the browser or in Windows or in the new world of software plus services as they come together. We need to have a common programming model like Silverlight and .NET that spans these things. We need tools not just for software developers; we actually need the tools for the designers who build these user interfaces, which is what we launched with our Expression toolset, complementing VisualStudio.NET.

And you’ll see us not just in our tools but in our own applications put more and more of a premium on enabling the end user. The most popular business intelligence application in the world is Excel. It’s got to get better at it. The most popular application in the world at tracking people and context is Outlook; it needs to get better and richer, and we enable you to build new technologies that leverage the user interfaces that people understand but build new applications that they never before thought were possible.

So, we can’t any of us lose sight in products like Office or SharePoint or Visual Studio or Expression on building the user interface that really lets people get at and use the data they want.

That’s one of the reasons why search, not just Internet search but corporate search is so important to Microsoft, because it’s the place that people start looking for information.

I’m going to make a horrible admission in front of you here today. You can’t tell any of the Microsoft people in the audience that you heard it. I have never used the Microsoft CRM system that all of our salespeople use. I like to go to our internal intranet and just do a search, find me the customer record about Bradesco, as opposed to going to the CRM system.

And so linking up and making these user interfaces more natural, more approachable, more accessible in a variety of ways, that is a key element of Dynamic IT.

I think one of the areas where we’ve done a particularly good job on user experience is with Microsoft Outlook. It kind of shows you the future. Outlook on the PC is very rich and it’s very extensible. There are so many people writing add-ins and customizations for Outlook, something you couldn’t do in Outlook as a browser application. But there’s a time and a place when you want that same experience, you want it quickly available in the browser, and we deliver that through Outlook Web Access. You want that on the phone, we deliver that through Outlook Mobile. You even want it through your telephone, not on a Smart Phone, you just want to be able to call and get your e-mail read to you over a simple voice connection, we’ve enabled that.

So, rich user interface from voice to Internet to PC to phone, all wrapped up to allow people to do exactly what they want in the convenient and familiar interface of Outlook, but with all of the richness that you as developers and IT people can provide, in a variety of different contexts.

So, as we talk about Dynamic IT, rich user experience, the trend to software plus services, security, trust, and productivity, and virtualization are all key themes.

To help bring it alive and put it together in its totality, I would like to invite up on stage for a demonstration of a customer solution Richard Chavez, who’s Platform Strategy Advisor for Microsoft, and our customer, Mr. Posada, chief executive officer of Saraiva Bookstore here in Brazil. Please join me in welcoming them onstage. (Applause.)

(Demonstration not interpreted.)

(Applause.)

STEVE BALLMER: I’m sure everybody wants to race to the Web site now and buy a movie, and I’m sure Mr. Posada would appreciate that as well. Good business today.

I hope the demonstration gives you a little bit of a sense of why the premium, even as this world evolves, the premium will remain on making sure that we provide rich user interface. The difference between selling or renting a lot of videos and a few isn’t just a question of what’s on the back-end; it’s the kind of exciting user interface that Richard had a chance to show you that will make a big part of the difference in the overall experience.

I want to conclude with a couple of thoughts. All of us come here today because in some senses we use, we’re interested in the future of technology and specifically Microsoft technologies: Windows, Windows Server, .NET, Visual Studio, Silverlight, SharePoint, Office.

And yet if you take a look at it over the course of the 12 month period that ends June of next year, this is just a subset of all of the exciting new innovations Microsoft will bring to market: client operating system releases, information management tools, security, gaming products and systems. The range of new technologies in some senses is growing and growing quickly.

Part of our job is to bring this kind of great innovation to market, and part of our job is to put it in a form where it’s accessible and easy to take advantage of.

Some of you probably work in very small shops, a couple or three developers or a couple or three IT people. Some of you probably work in bigger organizations. And no matter what the size, no matter what the complexity of your own problems, we’re trying to bring the largest set of technologies to bear so that you can immediately find what you need and get the job done with agility that your client or that your company is paying you to do; the kind of agility that you saw in the demonstrations, the kind of agility that we hope to bring you every day.

In this environment everybody in the technology business is going to be pressed to do more with less, and the more we can build into the fundamental tools and technologies, the more that we can move to this new world of software plus services and virtualization to reduce deployment complexity and deployment cost, the better off we all will be.

There is a very exciting future in front of all of us in the technology world, and we certainly appreciate all of the time and attention you spend with Microsoft focusing in on these and other technologies.

Every year I get up at something like a Tech-Ed and say this is it, this is the biggest year we’ve ever had for new tools and technologies, and then every year there’s more. And that reflects Microsoft and sort of our growing pool of products, but it also reflects just the incredible and amazing opportunity in our business overall.

So, to all of you I want to promise a very exciting next year, next five years in this industry, and I want to also say Microsoft for its part will do our best job to continue to let you build and leverage the skills that you have, and as technology moves forward, we want to be able to bring you forward with us, loving, embracing new technologies, delivering new solutions, and really forming the backbone of the group of people who know how to make Dynamic IT technology that works, that gets the job done, that’s vibrant, that’s real time, that’s exciting.

And for all of you we intend to do our very best job not only with tools but also our local team here in Brazil welcomes your ideas, welcomes your suggestions. We are pleased to have you as members of our MSDN and TechNet communities, and you can count on our best help and our best support.

I for one want you to know that if I can help, you let me know. My e-mail address is [email protected]. If I’m not the right person to answer your question, which may well be the case, as complex and broad as the portfolio is, I’ll make sure you get an answer. But please don’t hesitate to contact anybody here in our Brazilian subsidiary or shoot me a piece of e-mail; we’d be glad to help.

Thank you for all the support of our products, thank you for your interest in the new technologies. Let’s go out there and build the future world of technology together. Thank you very much.

(Cheers, applause.)

END