Brad Anderson: Tech•Ed Europe 2010

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage the corporate vice president, management and security division, Brad Anderson. (Applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON: Hey, good afternoon, everybody. I’m excited to be back here in Europe, and I was excited to get the invitation to come and speak today, but, really on behalf of Microsoft, let me just start out by saying how grateful we are to all of you for taking the time to spend this week with us. We know it’s time away from work, we know it’s time away from family and friends, and we are very, very appreciative of the opportunity to be able to talk with you about some of the innovation that we’ve done, and find ways for us to partner more deeply.

How many of you like the Kinect demo over here? (Applause.) Yeah?

Let me give you a little personal anecdote. I’m a father of three teenage daughters, and so I’m always looking for ways to preoccupy the teenage boys when they come to visit my daughters. Boy, the Kinect works great. They’ll be available later this week here in Europe, so it’s a great thing to have.

Let me give you a little more background about myself, and then let’s get into the conversation.

My role at Microsoft is I run the engineering organization that builds System Center, Forefront, Windows Intune, the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, and then my team also oversees all of our embedded Windows work.

I sit on the leadership team that oversees the work that we do in the developer tools in Visual Studio, in SQL, in Windows Server and Windows Azure.

So, it’s a great opportunity to come here and give you a view of what our vision is, the innovation that we’re driving, and again thank you on behalf of all at Microsoft for being here.

As a data point, 6,000 people registered for the event today. It looks like the room is pretty full here, and then we have a lot of people who are also watching this online.

It’s sold out, and, I’ve got to tell you, it is the most exciting time in the industry that I’ve ever been a part of. You know, I had the opportunity to participate in the transition to X86 servers that’s been happening for the past 20-plus years, and the opportunity that stands in front of us right now with respect to the cloud is more exciting.

I look at this and I go, wow, what an opportunity for all of us to participate in what I think is going to be one of the most remarkable changes that we’ve ever gone through as an industry and as a society.

You know, I like to learn from the past, and I think there’s a lot that you can learn when you look into the past. So, one of the things that I thought would be interesting to start with would be an example from the past where there was a significant transition, and then draw some of the conclusions to the transition to the cloud.

What you’re looking at here is a waterwheel that was used to generate power. Now, to give you an idea of the scale of this, you see those gentlemen standing in the lower left-hand of this? This was 18 meters in diameter, weighed 225 kilograms. This was the envy of the industrialized world in 1850. This was built by a gentleman named Henry Burton. This provided about the equivalent of 500 horsepower but allowed his business to do things that were unheard of at the time. For example, he could output one horseshoe every second at a cost that nobody else could compete with. What that enabled him to do is he provided all the horseshoes to the northern army in the United States Civil Union. This was literally the envy of the industrialized world.

But yet, 50 years later, it sat abandoned and vacant in a field because electricity had come along, and the whole world had shifted.

But yet that shift was interesting. There’s interesting things to look at in the shift. When electricity first came, every manufacturing facility built their own power plant, and, in fact, in the year 1900, there were 50,000 unique power plant facilities in the United States alone. Twenty years later, over 70 percent of all the electricity used by industry was being generated by centralized organizations rather than individually owned private organizations.

Now, think about this with respect to the cloud for a minute. We’ve been deploying datacenters for two, three decades in a specific way. The cloud comes along and gives us many more options. We can deploy private clouds; we can deploy public clouds. There’s infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service.

I would submit to you the North Star; the destination is platform as a service. Just like in this example here, Henry Burton built this wheel, but a few years later we had this power grid that provides electricity to everyone in the world. As we project forward, and we look into where the industry goes long-term, we believe it’s platform as a service. Now it’s a journey. We’re going to be using infrastructure as a service; we’re going to be using software as a service.

And that’s what I want to talk about today. We’re living in a time of unparalleled change. There’s change occurring on the devices and how our users want to work. It’s no longer one user working on one PC. The number of devices that they want to use to be productive is growing and expanding, and they’re putting pressure on IT. IT is looking at the cloud; how can we take advantage of the cloud?

And I think what’s really interesting is where they come together — how do you take these rich devices that our users are using and marry that with the cloud, and create new business opportunity and create new opportunities for everyone involved?

So, what we’re going to do is we’re going to start talking; we’re going to start at the end user’s device, and we’re going to go through some of the innovations and changes that we’re seeing in the industry on the actual device itself, and how end users want to work. We’re going to talk about how that’s being enhanced by the cloud, and then we’re going to talk about the cloud itself, and that’s what we’re going to do over about the next hour and 15 minutes.

First of all, let’s talk with Windows Phone. Windows Phone was launched here in Europe on Oct. 22. It actually launches today in the United States.

One of the most fascinating things I think about Windows Phone is the amount of choice that you get. To kind of give you an idea of just the amount of choice, there are nine devices that will be available across 60 carriers in 30 different countries.

The interest has been overwhelming on Windows Phone. Worldwide to date, we’ve had over half a million downloads of the SDK; interestingly enough, half of those from Europe. So, Europe is definitely, I think, leading the way in terms of how we’re thinking about Windows Phone and how that can be used.

Now, let me give you a little personal experience. I’ve had the opportunity to use one of these phones for the last several months. You know, I’m kind of a gadget guy. My kids like to give a bad time because about every three months I have a new phone.

This is without a doubt the best phone I have ever used. Just the subtle changes in the way that they built the interface, and the way that you can navigate across the different things that you can accomplish on the phone is just unparalleled. It’s been remarkable in terms of how much it has saved me time.

How many of you remember the first time you got a phone and you started doing e-mail on it? You know, to me, that saved like a half an hour a day because I was able to triage e-mail and get some work done in times when I otherwise could not.

This phone for me took it to the next level, and just the way that it integrates the cloud and that rich experience on the device has been unparalleled, so I get this captivating experience.

It integrates with your existing infrastructure. So, it can be managed through System Center.

From a development standpoint, it uses the same tools that you’re comfortable with in Visual Studio.

So, with Windows Phone, you get this incredible experience that integrates with what you’ve already had.

How many people would actually like to see a demo of Windows Phone? Come on. (Applause.)

So, what we’re going to do then is we’re going to invite Brandon Watson up, and he’s going to show you some of the things about Windows Phone. Brandon. (Applause.)

BRANDON WATSON: So, hi. My name is Brandon Watson. I work on Windows Phone 7, and I’m here to show you a couple things today. We’re going to talk about some apps and building apps and hopefully inspire you guys to think about what’s possible with the phone.

Now, remember, the phone, it was a complete reset; we started over, and what we wanted to focus on was enabling developers to make amazing applications for the phone.

So, the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to start out with a demo of some applications running on the phone, and what I want to focus on is the amazing user experiences that some top companies here in the U.K. have built.

Now, Tesco, a huge grocery store in the U.K., has really focused on building, one, a beautiful app, but enabling any customer who’s on the road, on the move; maybe you don’t have the ability to get to the grocery store, but you want to get some shopping done.

So, what you’ll see here is obviously a great-looking app taking advantage of the Windows Phone 7 unique user interface, the panoramic control, which is a way to move around a user interface without necessarily going in and out of menus. And I can go in and do some shopping if I want, maybe look for some fresh food or some organic produce.

And as you can see, it’s going to pull up the information, it’s going out to the cloud, it’s using their cloud services to power the application. It’s fetching the info, and I can go ahead and add say the celery to my basket, right?

So, I’m able to do a shopping experience on my phone, and then, once I’m done with my shopping, I can go ahead and look at my basket, and as you can see, it’s all of the things that I’ve been shopping for over maybe the course of a week. And then when I’m ready to go ahead and have these groceries delivered to my home, I can click “Book a Delivery Slot,” and right now from the phone without ever having to go to a grocery store, I can actually take advantage of all that Tesco brings in — that great shopping experience but on my phone — and now have that built right here on the application.

So, here’s a top brand that’s extending their user experience to the phone using their cloud services and building a great-looking app.

Now, another app I’d like to show you is AlloCine. This is for people who want to make a decision about what movie they want to go see. Top brand in France, they want to empower you to take your phone, and maybe you’re standing at the cinema, and you don’t know what movie you want to see. Here, you can pull them up based on the names. You’ve got the posters and the running time. Or maybe you want to do a search for a movie that you wanted to see. Now, there’s a new movie out called “Inception” that I wanted to see, and I’ve gone ahead and typed that wrong. And what I want us to note if you’re a developer in the house, you’ll see that even with the soft input panel, the keyboard, you get the auto correct for free. So, that’s nice, you don’t need to worry about that.

So, here it is, it pulls up “Inception,” a nice movie poster. I can tap on that, and that’s going to go again retrieve that information from the cloud. What I have here is the information about the movie. I can see what the critics are saying about it, whether it’s the press or customers.

And they also bring a very rich multimedia experience to the phone where I can watch videos, whether it’s behind-the-scenes videos, or I can take a look at photos from the set or of the movie.

So, a great movie experience on the phone, helping you make decisions.

The last app I want to show you is eBay. This is obviously a global brand for auctions. It’s a gorgeous app. But again, what I want you to take note of is the consistent user interface, and yet the branding comes alive. This is very much an eBay application, but I already know how to use the app because the metaphors are common across all the Windows Phone apps.

So, you’ve got the panorama to move through the user landscape. I’ve actually gone ahead and done a search for some cell phones. This is actually going to go out and hit the live data out on eBay.

And you’ll see the results are coming back, and this is another unique to Windows Phone 7 user interface, the pivot control. If I tap here on auctions, this is a way to logically group data and make it easier for your customers to get at information. You’ll see that the number of results changes, and it’s just presenting that data based on that pivot for me, and making it really easy to find, say, the HTC Tilt. I can go in and pull up that, and put in a bid or whatever it is that you’d want to do within eBay. You have the power of eBay right here on your phone.

Now, before we jump out to the code building, what I want to show you is the hot deals. And this is important because we’re going to show this in the demo here in a second. This is live data. This is going up and hitting the eBay service. So, the hot deals that you see here, the phone and the TV with the baseball screen, we’ll be seeing that again in a minute.

So, those are some apps that some top brands have built for Windows Phone 7. Now what I’m going to show you is how you can go ahead and think about building those applications using Visual Studio.

The Windows Phone developer tools are free for everybody. It includes Visual Studio for Windows Phone and Expression Blend for Windows Phone, plus the emulator so that you can do your testing either on your computer or on the handset.

What we’ve got here is just your basic panorama-based application. You can see it’s ready to go. And because we’re doing a Tech•Ed demo, I’m going to go ahead and just change some simple things here to show you that it’s a live demo. So, I’m at a Tech•Ed demo. This is just your standard XAML. Anyone who’s a Silverlight developer in the audience, raise your hand. You know, if you’re a Silverlight developer, you are now a mobile developer. That’s great. This should all look very, very familiar to you.

So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to go ahead and change the panorama. Again, the panorama is the ability to move in that landscape, and see different information within the application.

So, I’m going to put those hot deals on here, and I’m going to go ahead and swap out some of this XAML with some pre-canned XAML that I wrote, so I don’t have to bore you with typing it out.

And for the guys that are in the audience that caught what I just did there, you’ll see OData. Last week, at our Professional Developers Conference, we announced OData library for Windows Phone 7, and this enables anybody who has an OData feed to unlock the power of data within your organization. So, what we’ve done is we piggyback on top of HTTP and the AtomPub, and you’re able to make the data queryable and accessible to anybody within an organization, and anybody who wants to either be on a public feed or inside your organization.

So, in order to enable this, I just have to do one really simple thing. I’ll go ahead here and add references to the libraries, and it’s going to bring up my add references dialogue, and we’ll do a quick browse, and to my references. You’ll see this is the eBay library that was auto-generated for us, as well as the OData Windows Phone 7 library, which is available at CodePlex.

So, I’m going to go ahead and add those references, and then to show you how easy it is to unlock this OData feed within the context of your application, I’m going to swap over here to the code, and you’ll see just these seven lines of code, and I’m just going to uncomment these. And all that’s going on here is I’m creating a collection, doing a little data binding to the ListBox within each of those inside the panorama, and then going ahead and loading the data asynchronously to the eBay OData feed, which you’ll see right here.

So, if I go ahead and hit F5 to run the application, you’ll see it loaded up in the emulator. Again, within Windows Phone 7 in the dev tools, you can either run on the emulator or go out to the phone, but we’ve gone ahead for simplicity’s sake, and sent it to the emulator here, and you’ll see the hot deals. Again, the same deals you saw on the phone in the live data, I’ve gone ahead and incorporated them here. I also issued a search under items for Windows Phone 7 phones. So, it looks like there’s a couple dealers out there buying phones. So, everyone in Germany who said you can’t find one at the stores, your best bet is probably maybe go up to eBay and look for one.

So, there in just a few short minutes, I’ve shown you some great applications, some top brands extending their brand onto Windows Phone, building beautiful applications, and the ability to build those applications in Windows Phone using our Windows Phone developer tools. It’s very easy to get started. If you’re a Silverlight developer, it’s a snap.

So, hopefully I’ve inspired a few of you and shown you some amazing things that you might be able to do. Whether it’s extend line-of-business applications within your organization or build consumer applications for your end users, hopefully you’re inspired, and you’ll go out and get the tools for free at create.msdn.com.

Thanks so much, and have a great rest of the show. Thanks, Brad. (Applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON: Thank you so much, Brandon.

Isn’t that exciting? You know, it’s a remarkable device; it’s incredibly easy to use. Now is the time to jump on getting the applications published.

So, one of my calls to action to you is go download the SDK, get those applications built. Let’s get them registered and published into the marketplace, and get these applications flowing through.

Interesting data point: Since Windows Phone was launched on Oct. 22 here in Europe, just from European companies, there have been over 600 applications already published into marketplace. So, it’s a great, great opportunity.

Now, the way users want to work is changing. We talked about Windows Phone, but the phone in general is becoming much more of a device that is used to get work done. And it’s not that there are devices replacing the traditional way, but the number of devices users want to use and are demanding IT to enable them to use is expanding.

I’ll also use me as an example. I’ve got my laptop that I carry to meetings with me and that I take home. I’ve also got a desktop at my desk where I’ve got multiple screens that I like to work on. I have my phone, and there are times when I need to accomplish something — I may be at home, I may be somewhere else — and the phone may not be the appropriate place to do it. I need to go sit down but get my work done on a device that isn’t owned by the corporation, and may or may not be secure.

But the bottom line is users want to work how, where and when they want, and IT needs to deliver this, but at the same time needs to do it in a way that ensures compliance and security, predictability, and there’s this tension. You know, users are asking you to enable them to work in new and different ways, and you’re saying, I get it, “How do I do that but still deliver back to the company what I need?”

You know, this particular part of the segment, part of the business has been called device management, desktop management, and what’s happened in the industry is depending upon the device that you’re using — there’s a different management capability.

What happens is it forces IT to deploy multiple infrastructures, use multiple tools, and it forces from the end-user perspective them to understand how to adjust how they get their work done based on the device that they’re using.

OK, bottom line, this introduces cost; it introduces friction, and it doesn’t enable our users to be as productive as what they should be.

So, the model has got to change. Instead of having the device at the center, the user has to be the center of the model, and we have to build out capabilities that allow you to express an intent on how you want a user to be able to accomplish their work based upon the user’s working environment. If they’re on a corporate and a trusted device, enable the application and user settings and data to flow to the user in this manner, but if they’re on a noncorporate device, a nontrusted device, automatically adjust intelligently how that’s delivered based upon this policy. It’s a vision we have at Microsoft called user-centric client computing, and it’s all about putting the user at the center.

Now, virtualization is key to this. Virtualization is absolutely a core fundamental building block of enabling users to work how, where and when they want.

So, I want to cover some of the things that are coming in Service Pack 1 of Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. There are some new capabilities coming in that are specific to virtualization that are going to help us as we go down this path of user-centric client computing, and that’s going to be of interest to you as you’re looking at how you look at alternate ways to deliver the desktop, like VDI.

First of all, just a couple of comments on Windows 7. First of all, IDC just published a report in which they said 88 percent of all businesses worldwide have said they’re going to move to Windows 7 within the next two years. Interestingly enough, in that same report, 60-plus percent of those organizations say that they will have moved in the next six months. So, we’re just incredibly humbled by the acceptance and the adoption that we’re seeing of Windows 7.

Now, let me cover these two data points or these two new capabilities that will be coming in Service Pack 1, which incidentally Service Pack 1 will be available in its release form in the first quarter of 2011.

But there’s two things I want to talk about. The first one is called RemoteFX, and the second one is called Dynamic Memory, and these both have incredible impact as you look to deploy VDI in your environment.

First of all, with VDI, it’s been a decision point; you’ve had to make a tradeoff. If I use VDI, my end users are not going to get the optimal Windows 7 experience. They’re not going to see some of the new innovation like the Aero or the Glass interface. You don’t get a true 3-D type of an environment.

RemoteFX is a very unique innovation that Microsoft is coming out with in Service Pack 1, and what it does it is allows us to virtualize the GPU and use the hardware in a way to accelerate the graphics.

Bottom line, your users get a VDI environment, get the same high-fidelity experience of Windows 7 as if it was running locally. It’s incredibly powerful to see, and it’s implemented at a hardware layer and also in the software. So, for example, as you start deploying Service Pack 1 across your environments, all the Windows 7 clients are going to be enabled for what you’re going to see in a couple of minutes. As you start to deploy Service Pack 1 Windows Server 2008 R2, the back-end is going to be enabled. So, it’s very easy to start to take advantage of the new capabilities.

The second set of capabilities is something that we call Dynamic Memory, and what this is about is it’s all about going out and being able to predefine how much memory your VDI session should consume, but allowing the system to dynamically adjust up and down on an as-needed basis as the user needs additional memory.

Now, why is this important? What’s the most expensive component of deploying a VDI solution? It’s the hardware. If we could help you get increased levels of density in your hardware, your cost in a VDI scenario go down.

So, with Service Pack 1, what you will see is you will see a 40 percent improvement in the density that we enable on Hyper-V in a VDI environment, and, with this 40 percent improvement, I’m making the statement that we will have the highest density of VDI sessions in the market; yes, a significant improvement.

OK, so let’s take a look at it. So, what we want to give you is a view into a couple of these capabilities, RemoteFX, Dynamic Memory, and to do that we’re going to invite Michael Kleef out. Give him a welcome. (Applause.)

MICHAEL KLEEF: So, in March of this year, we announced Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1, like Brad just mentioned, with two new features, Remote Effects and Dynamic Memory.

Like Brad mentioned, Remote Effects delivers some very, very desktop experience powered by a server side GPU. And Dynamic Memory significantly improves VM density on Hyper-V. And like Brad mentioned, up to 40 percent higher VDI density.

Now, at the same time we made those announcements, we also announced the strengthening of our relationship with Citrix, and how Citrix was going to integrate Remote Effects into the industry leading XenDesktop solution.

So, today, I want to spend a moment just to show you a preview of some of that work that we’ve been doing with Citrix, integrating Remote Effects with Dynamic Memory with XenDesktops. So, as we switch to my screen here, what you see here on the desktop is this Citrix XenDesktop Web interface. I’ve already taken the liberty of logging in. So, for those of you here in the back, it might be a little difficult to read some of the text here, but, as you can see, my logged on name is in place.

You can see my Remote Effects VDI desktop calling in XenDesktop. Now, again, I’ve already, just in the interest of time, I’ve already logged onto the desktop, and you can see that VM matching down here. Now, once I switch up to it, you see that full-fidelity aero glass experience of Remote Effects.

What I’m going to first do is show you an example of IE9 running with Remote Effects. So, as we pop that up, what you’ll see here is a Windows Phone 7 video that’s currently playing on TV. Now, of course, I can pop that to full-screen if I want to, and I see that in full-fidelity. Now, this is a Flash application, mind you, as well.

Now, what’s interesting to see is what is actually going on in the backend, on the server side, while this is all occurring. So, we’re actually running all of this demo on our sort of HP BL-460 blade in the back there. Now, what you see in this is the GPU in action on the green line, and the processor, which is the red line. You can see in that processor drawing the screen, the GPU is doing the majority of the work. The processor was doing hardly anything. So, that shows a little superior architected solution that doesn’t necessarily bottleneck up the processor like some of the competitive solutions do.

So, as I minimize that back down again, and go back to up VDI, it’s great to sit there and watch videos all day, but we probably actually do need to do some work at some time. So, I’m going to go switch over to my favorites, and I’m going to select this business intelligence application. And while that pops up, what I’m going to do is, I’m going to run some queries here.

Now, this is something you haven’t seen before, this application. In fact, it’s going to be previewed at the SQL PASS Conference in the next couple of days, and you’re going to see a lot more of it there. But, we get the opportunity to have a look at it today.

So, I’m selecting a whole bunch of parameters. Now, we’re in the movie business; we want to do a movie sales report and see exactly how well our business has been doing. So, I’ve selected a bunch of parameters there, and what I’m now going to do is resize this. Bear in mind, this is a Silverlight application running inside IE9. I’m going to go to layout. I’m going to change the layout to something that’s a little bit more easy to read. I’m going to hit the layout, and you can see that update. There’s a nice tile view of some of those movies.

What I also want to do is, I want to do some business sales reports. So, I want to see by genre how are we doing in terms of our revenue. So, I want to go to sales. I’m going to select revenue year to date. And we see that updated. Now, text is a little boring, isn’t it? It’s not like it’s really dynamic. So, I’m going to go switch that over into a bar graph, and see that update. Again, I’ll drag it out so we can see that a little bit better.

So, you can see sci-fi/fantasy certainly makes up a big part of our business, but why, why is our business so driven by sci-fi? I mean, certainly not everyone sits there watching “Star Trek.” So, I’m going to go and update this Web part into a scatter graph.

And the next thing I’m going to change is, I want to see how our downloads year to date have been going, and then see the number of title rules that actually apply to that genre, so you can see comedy certainly makes the bulk of the downloads, but sci-fi definitely made us a lot more money with, albeit, less titles. Interesting.

Let’s try and understand why month-on-month that could have had an influence. So, I’m going to go to date and select month, the Web part updates, and now I want to just go in and move that to full screen. I’m going to hit play on the BIF, and what you’ll see here is comedy, for all intents and purposes, makes a lot of business for us. But, hang on a second, the latter half of the last year or so, sci-fi suddenly became very, very important to our business. Let’s understand why.

So, as I go and click on sci-fi over here, what I see here is the left-hand pane updates, and basically tells us that “Avatar” was significantly responsible for the revenues of our business.

So, what I’ve shown you today is XenDesktop working with Remote Effects and Dynamic Memory. The interesting thing with this demo that you just saw here is you looked past completely the fact that we were using Remote Effects. In fact, you probably started to ignore it after a while because it became just a part of your desktop experience. And that’s the power of Remote Effects to deliver the right user experience to all of your users.

So, like I just mentioned, I’ve shown you XenDesktop with Remote Effects and Dynamic Memory. What I would also encourage you to do if you want to learn more about this is definitely go to the Remote Effects pavilion in the expo hall, and have a chat with Citrix about XenDesktop and how Remote Effects works with it. While you’re at it, have a chat with Citrix about some of their scaling tools because they can absolutely work with Remote Effects today. And then, after that, hop across to the HP stand. HP is about to release an ultra-light thin client. This is a thin client designed for Remote Effects, uses as little as two watts of power, and is completely solid state in nature.

With that, thank you. (Applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON: Thank you.

When you’re speaking about VDI deployment, I would submit the following — Remote Effects, Dynamic Memory are prerequisites if you want to deliver the full, rich Windows 7 client experience. Just to repeat, Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 will be available in the first quarter of 2011.

How many of you noticed the Internet Explorer 9 there in the demo? Over 10 million downloads of that, we’ve received just astoundingly good feedback of that beta so far.

Now, we’ve talked about some of the innovation, and some of the things that are happening at the end point. What’s going on with Windows Mobile Phone, some of the things that we’re doing in virtualization, and how that impacts the way you can deliver the user’s work environment.

I want to talk now about how the cloud can significantly enhance the end-user experience. And I want to talk about two specific software as service offerings that we’ve announced and are in beta today. The first is Office 365. As you think about Office 365, first of all, think about the next generation of our Office productivity suite, and think about all the rich capabilities that you’ve always known and always used on your desktop, married with a set of services in the cloud such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online.

Think to yourself for a minute, how many of you have had the experience where you come to an event like this, you see all the new innovation, all the new things that, you know, partners like Microsoft are building, and then you go back to the office and it takes you two or three years to upgrade the infrastructure to take advantage of what you saw in the conference? Has anybody had that frustrating experience before? OK.

One of the great things about software as a service, like Office 365 and Windows Intune, is the day that we update the back-end is the day you consume the new capabilities. But, all about accelerating that time to when you can fully take advantage of it. Windows Intune is our tool that we give to IT that enables them to manage and secure the desktop. So, you can think about this in terms of System Center Online, Forefront Online, and it also comes with the rights to the Desktop Optimization Pack and future upgrades to Windows.

So, again, delivering through the cloud, using software as a service, one of the ways that you can consume the cloud, we give you the rich capabilities to consume this new value instantly to Office 365 and through Windows Intune — I want to show them both to you.

So, let’s start with Office 365, and let’s invite to the stage David Anderson.

DAVID ANDERSON: Hi, Brad. Thanks.

Hello, Tech·Ed. So, today using Office 365, I want to show you how you can make your users productive in a matter of minutes, and you don’t have to worry about managing the hardware infrastructure, worrying about disaster recovery or a high availability because Microsoft takes care of that for you, and you can focus on your business. Here I am in the Office 365 portal, I’ve logged on, and this is the home page that I land on. All the users can land on this home page. From here, I can get instant access to my e-mail through Outlook Web Apps. I can actually download and install the Lync 2010 client, and download and install the Microsoft Office Pro Plus 2010 client, all as part of the subscription.

But, as an admin, all I have to do is go out to the admin console right here, and I get the ability  I’ll have to log back in here. But, I have the ability then to manage my users, my domains, and go deeper into managing the Exchange Online workload, the SharePoint Online Workload and the Lync Online workload. Now, today I’m working for Contoso, and we’re working on a business plan to expand our business, and I want to collaborate with one of my partners, my consultant Chris Mayo, who happens to work for Fabricam.

So, I would like to collaborate with him through an extranet and Lync Online. Normally on-premises setting up an extranet, or federating Lync organizations is a nontrivial exercise — you have to punch a hole in the firewall. You have to think about security management and the threat management and all that. But, with Office 365, we can do it in a matter of minutes. All I have to do is go out to my SharePoint Online administrative portal and go to managing site collections, and rather than worrying about setting up a SharePoint server farm, I can create a new site collection instantly.

Just type in a few simple things here; we’ll name it Fabnet One. We’ll make it an express site. I’ll add myself as the user administrator. And we’ll make it a small site about 500 megabytes. And just like that, I’ve now created a site collection in SharePoint Online. To turn it to an extranet is even easier.

All I have to do is go right here, go to manage external users. Now, I’ve already done it for this site, set it to allow external users and saved it. We’ve already done it, so I won’t do it now. And it’s now an extranet, just that quick. How long did that take me, 30 seconds? Pretty easy, huh?

But, now I need  my consultant Chris Mayo needs to be able to collaborate with me on it. So, he needs to know about the extranet. So, I just go out to the extranet site that we’ve created, go to site settings, edit the external user permissions, and all I’ve got to do is type in his e-mail address, decide what permissions I want to give him, so I want to be able to contribute. I want him to be able to edit documents. And then, just send him a quick message, and this will send him an e-mail that has a Lync to the extranet site, and he just has to click on because now I’ve already added him as a user, and he’s instantly in that extranet site.

If I want to federate our Lync online organization, it’s as simple as going out to the Lync online control panel, clicking on the domain federation, and I’ve already done this, but I’ll show you what I did and just open that up, and now I’m going to allow federation with all those domains, except the ones I block, and just like that, guess what, our Lync Online organizations are federated, just that simple.

So, we’re working on this business plan. We want to expand our business. So, I’ve got the Word document open in Word 2010 that I opened from the extranet site. I’d like Chris to take a quick look at this document and see if I’ve got everything all right. So, I just use the power of Word and Backstage, working with Lync Online, and SharePoint Online, and I’m just going to send him an instant message through Lync online that says, we’re federated, and Chris is in my frequent contacts list. He comes up right there and I can even see his presence because our organizations have federated. I’ll just send him a quick message here asking if he can take a quick look at this document.

I’ll send the IM, and, as you can see, he’ll get a Lync directly to this document that he can just open up because he’s already got permissions on the extranet site, so sure, no problem. Now, Office 365 is more than just the sum of its parts because Office, SharePoint, Exchange and Lync were all built and designed to work together, but not all organizations are able to deliver on this. The cloud changes that. With Office 365, we deliver these products with the best in productivity all working together as they were designed, and we deliver it through the cloud.

Now, as you can see, Chris is coming here. He’s actually made some edits. Here, we’ve got this top paragraph is locked because he was editing it. I could be editing in a different area of the document at the same time. So, we can do simultaneous editing with Office 2010. And, in fact, it shows right here that there are some updates available. Chris has made some updates. All I’ve got to do is hit save and refresh, and just like that it will show me in the highlighted areas here the edits that Chris has made. We did this all collaboratively through SharePoint Online, quickly set up an extranet. Federated our Lync Online organization, and just like that we’re productive. That’s productivity with Office 365. But, wait, there’s more.

So, we’ve worked really hard on this business plan, and I had a vacation plan. So, I leave on vacation, and normally I don’t take my laptop with me on vacation because I’m with my family, and I’m not going to do any work. Well, Chris wants me to take one last look at this document. So, he calls me on my Windows Phone, and I say sure, no problem. All I’ve got to do is go to the business center at the hotel, log onto any Internet-connected PC, go out to  log onto my Office 365 extranet site, and I can open this document with one click in the Office Web Applications in SharePoint Online, and I get the same rich fidelity and rich experience that I do in my rich Word client back on my PC.

This is Office 365, completing the promise of making you and your users productive anytime, anywhere, on any platform, 365 days a year. That’s the power of Office 365. Thanks so much and have a great Tech·Ed. (Applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON: Thanks, David. You can see how Office 365 becomes a core part of that. How do you enable users to work how, where, and when they want? That’s one of the tensions coming in on IT. Now, what can we do to enable IT to respond to these, and be able to manage the devices how and wherever they may be and that’s Windows Intune. Windows Intune is a software as a service that is built on the exact same infrastructure that we built Windows Update on. Just to give you an idea of how robust this infrastructure is, Windows Update this month updated over 700 million PCs around the world. So, that same infrastructure we’ve now brought to an online service that delivers to you an integrated management and security offering that enables you to manage devices from anywhere in the world, where you want to manage them, and to manage them and to manage the devices anywhere in the world they may be.

So, rather than just giving you a demo on this, I thought you’d be interested in actually hearing from a customer that’s using it in production today. It’s a company called Doosan. It’s a global provider of these little manufacturing, these things called Bobcats. I’m sure you’ve seen them in construction sites. Doosan was spun out of a company, and day one when they became their own entity, they no longer could rely on the infrastructure from the company they had just come from. So, day one, here is this company, 3,000-plus employees, and they don’t have an infrastructure that they’ve relied on for so many years.

So, they’re using in beta today, the beta of Windows Intune, to manage their 3,000-plus PCs. Let’s actually hear from them how they’re using it, and what they think of it. Let’s go ahead and roll that video.

(Video segment.)

One of the design points that we had with Windows Intune was to deeply integrate management and security. And as you get a chance to download this and start using it, that’s one of the first things that you’ll notice is just how deeply integrated management and security is.

We’ve talked as an industry for years and years about this converging. In Windows Intune, you actually see that happen. Windows Intune will scale to the largest enterprise organizations in the world. The first version, which will be released in 2011, is not going to be as feature-rich as, say, System Center Configuration Manager, but we’re going to get it there. And if you think about what the cloud enables and where we need to go as an industry, you need to start thinking about how you’re going to use these online services, these software as a service, like Office 365, like Windows Intune.

Now I talked about that convergence of management and security. We’re also doing that with our on premise software. And we’re doing that with what we call Forefront Endpoint Protection. So, today we’re announcing that the release candidate is available today for Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010.

Let me tell you what is unique about this, and why this is going to be of interest to you. Forefront Endpoint Protection is built on the same infrastructure that System Center Configuration Manager is. What that means is one infrastructure in your organization can provide your desktop management, as well as your endpoint protection. I said desktop, but that applies to servers as well.

One infrastructure to manage, not two, not three. So, there’s some media cost savings there. But, I think, even more importantly, because all the information is brought together in a single database, we can start to do things and enable you to get a deeper view into your environment because we have all this data together. This is also based upon the same capabilities that we deliver with Microsoft Security Essentials. This is our free anti-malware solution you can download from the Web, which today is being used on over 30 million desktops around the world.

So, on the same infrastructure as System Center, an integrated way that we can enable entirely new scenarios. I would really encourage you to go take a look at Forefront Endpoint Protection, and see how that can help you in the future.

So, we’ve been talking largely about the endpoint so far as a user. We just started to transition and how the cloud can enable your users to be more productive and can enable you, in terms of IT, in different ways. We’re going to spend the remainder of the afternoon talking explicitly about the cloud. Now, when I talk about the cloud, I’m going to talk about it today using three terms. I’m going to talk about infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and software as a service.

We just spent the last 20 minutes or so talking about software as a service. That is what Windows Intune is, that’s what Office 365 is, Exchange Online, and others. We’re going to spend the bulk of the next 40 minutes or so talking about infrastructure as a service, and platform as a service. So, let’s start with infrastructure as a service.

This is the next logical step for organizations who have been doing virtualization. And, as you transition from virtualization to infrastructure as a service, and let’s say to a private cloud, the things that are unique and what you start to do now that are different than just a standard virtualization solution is, you have a self-service model, the infrastructure is inherently elastic and can expand and contract as needed. And, finally, it’s based on a shared infrastructure. That shared infrastructure may be virtual business units inside your organization. It might be multiple customers in terms of a service provider.

Infrastructure as a service is where a great deal of the investment is going to be over the next several years, and there is incredible benefit of delivering on infrastructure as a service. What I think is unique about what Microsoft provides is we provide this in the context of all three that I’m going to talk about in a few more minutes, but it’s based upon the same tools you are already accustomed to — Hyper-V is just Windows. The management solution, it’s System Center. System Center is managing more Windows Servers around the world than all of our competitors combined, and it just snaps right in, in a very easy and a very simple way to do it.

Now, one of the questions I get a lot about Hyper-V is, how is Hyper-V doing? What kind of momentum is there behind Hyper-V? You’re looking at the IDC data that calls our hypervisor share. So, in this particular slide, I’m focused expressly on the share of the hypervisor worldwide comparing Microsoft to VMware, and look at the growth of Hyper-V compared to VMware. On that right column, you see the growth in the last two years, companies are making the bet and placing their businesses on Hyper-V.

You can make that bet and feel a great deal of assurance that you’re doing what others are doing. It’s inexpensive. It integrates with what you already have. I would encourage all of you to take a deep look at this.

If there’s one request I have for this kind of session, take your next two or three servers that you’re going to deploy — deploy them on Hyper-V. Give us a chance to show you how rich the experience is, how capable it is and how it integrates with what you’ve already got.

Now, we’re making some significant announcements today. Today, we’re making an announcement around what we call Hyper-V cloud. Think of Hyper-V Cloud as a set of programs that allow you, customers and partners, to rapidly deploy private cloud on Hyper-V. This is a set of programs and initiatives that are expressly focused on helping you to get to a private cloud as fast as you can.

Let me point out a couple of them. First of all, we have what we call Accelerate, Hyper-V Accelerate. Microsoft is willing to help pay to help you get to a private cloud. So, there’s a set of funds that we’ve made available to customers and to partners for proof of concept to deployment of private clouds in your environment. Please, talk with your Microsoft sales person, talk with your channel partner; let’s use these funds, and let’s get you deploying a private cloud as quickly as we can.

Deployment guides, deployment guides are a set of best practices that have been compiled from the thousands of deployments that we’ve done through our own consulting services around the world. They give you the guidance on how you would use  what the best practices are as you deploy private clouds. We then take it one step further with what we call Hyper-V Fast Track, and Fast Track is a set of reference architectures that are preconfigured, pretested, precertified by these six partners and Microsoft together that give you the fastest way to get a private cloud deployed.

By using these reference architectures you can rest assured that we’ve worked with these six key partners, Fujitsu, IBM, NEC, Hewlett Packard, Hitachi and Dell. We’re pretested. We’re precertified. We’ve preconfigured. We know exactly how to optimize the performance of these, so that you can take these fast-track, reference architectures and rapidly use them to build out private clouds in your environment.

These six vendors are responsible for over 80 percent of the world’s server sales, and I think this is one of the key differentiators in this program on Hyper-V than anything else on the market. You preserve your own choice. You get to choose which hardware you use. You get to choose which model of the hardware you get to use. You get to choose to do that with partners that you’re already accustomed to, that you’re already have partnerships with. The reference architecture is from Dell, Hewlett Packard and IBM are being made available today. If you go to Microsoft.com/privatecloud, from there, you can link out to these reference architectures to the deployment guides and really see how you can take advantage of these things.

Now, I want just to give you a little bit of an update on what we’ve been doing with Hewlett Packard. We announced this strategic partnership back in January, where we got together and announced a set of things that we’re going to do, expressly focused on helping you to rapidly deploy applications on an integrated and convergent infrastructure across Microsoft and Hewlett Packard.

The focus — lower your cost, increase your time to value and really simplify the work that has to be done by you in order to deploy clouds, and to take advantage of the application in those clouds. These are investments that we’re making across sales, services and engineering. And today, we’re making another announcement with Hewlett Packard. We’re announcing what we call the HP Cloud Foundation for Hyper-V. The HP Cloud Foundation for Hyper-V is an integration between Hewlett Packard’s BladeSystem Matrix and System Center.

So, the capabilities that come with all the Hewlett Packard servers integrated with System Center take you from an engineering standpoint; we’ve done the integration, and we’re doing more integration having to simplify that work. Hewlett Packard is also announcing what they call HP cloud stars, which is a set of services based upon that Hyper-V Cloud Foundation for Hyper-V to rapidly help you and aid you through their professional services in deploying private cloud, based on Hyper-V.

And with that, we have been doing a tremendous amount of innovation in the area of infrastructure as a service. And I thought it would be interesting to actually give you a glimpse into what’s coming in the next version of System Center and how we’re going to enable you to build out private clouds.

To do that, let’s invite Greg Jensen out. (Applause.)

GREG JENSEN: Thanks, Brad.

Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone. Today, I’m going to show you how to rapidly design and deploy a service in your own private cloud and run it on infrastructure you already have.

Now, this service is going to have three key features of cloud computing: First, it’s going to be elastic, able to scale to meet changing demands; second, it’s going to run on shared infrastructure in the datacenter; and third, it is going to be deployed by an application owner using self-service. Now, all of this is made possible by the next version of System Center.

Here, I have a sneak preview of our new console, and I’m logged in as a datacenter administrator. As the datacenter administrator, I can manage my infrastructure resources, I can manage my private cloud that runs on those shared resources, and I can manage my deployed services that run in my private cloud.

Deploying a new service is simplified by the creation of a service template. A service template brings together all the building blocks of a service, including gold VHD images, including application-specific packages, such as SQL configuration or IIS configuration, and a virtualized installation of my actual server applications, a new feature that we call Server App-V.

With this approach, the application is abstracted from the underlying operating system, which reduces the cost and complexity of ongoing maintenance. Creating a new service template is easy with our drag-and-drop designer. I am going to create an HR job search template.

This service is going to be a fully scaled-out, three-tier service. All I need to do is drag and drop my app tier, my database tier, and, finally, my Web tier into the designer. And then I can configure each tier of my service. First, the database tier is a single instance that is deployed first. My app tier is a single instance that I will deploy second, and, finally, my Web tier I will deploy third. This tier, I want to be scaled out to handle increasing demands. I will configure this tier to scale up to 10 instances if needed and start with an initial deployment of three.

Finally, I will version this as the 1.0 release as my HR job search service so that I can track version changes to my service going forward.

That completes the construction of this service template, and later you’ll see how an application owner can use this template to easily deploy a new service.

Now that we’ve configured our service to scale, let’s look at how our new private cloud model enables resource sharing. I am going to create a new cloud, and I’m going to create this cloud so that HR can run the job search application in production.

I’m going to call this cloud the Berlin HR Production Cloud. I’m going to deploy this cloud into my corporate cloud running here in Berlin. I’m going to put it on corp .NET using a load balancer and my default virtual IP space.

Since this is a production cloud, I will connect it to my high-performance storage area network, and I will also give it access to the library you saw earlier that contains my service template. Since this is a production cloud, I will also enable it to use all of the available capacity in my Berlin cloud if needed to handle load, and, finally, I will configure this machine with the virtual machine capability profiles that will run on it.

And with that, I’ve shown how our cloud model enables resource sharing, and that makes it easy for me to manage resources across my different business units. But with System Center, I can also enable my business by providing self-service management of my private cloud.

So, what I’m going to do is actually allow my HR IT admin, who I have here, to deploy an app to the cloud that I just created. So, I grant permission for managing the new Berlin HR production cloud to the HR IT admin role. I also grant access to the service template that we just created, found here, and confirm that the quota that this user is allowed to utilize in my Berlin HR production cloud is correctly set.

Now, my HR IT admin has everything he needs to deploy a new service in production all by himself. So, to demonstrate that, I’m going to change roles. I’m going to become the HR IT admin. So, here I’m logged in now as the HR IT admin to the same new System Center console, but my view here is very simple because I don’t have to worry about managing the underlying resources or fabric. I can focus on the business-critical services that I’m responsible for.

Notice, I can’t see hosts running in the datacenter, I just see the cloud that I want to run my apps on, and I see the library that contains the template that makes deploying new services easy.

So, let’s go ahead, and let’s deploy a new service that can run our HR job search app in production. Our app is HR Job Search, we’re going to run it in the production cloud. And because I’m using this service template approach to managing my private cloud, as the application owner, I have right here everything that I need to deploy this service in my private cloud. Here is my application; you can see that I have my Web server scaled out with three deployment instances initially. I have my database server and my application server.

The final step is to connect my tiers. First, I connect my application tier and my database tier by entering the database server name for my application tier. Second, I connect my Web tier and my app tier by entering the name of my app server in the configuration settings for my Web tier. With that, I’m ready to deploy my service. When I do, System Center intelligent placement will deploy my service to the optimal resources available right now in my private cloud. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is all you need to do to deploy a new service to run an application in production on your own private cloud. Thank you. (Applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON: Great. Thanks, Greg. Did you like how intuitive, how easy that was? You know, a couple of the engineers that worked on this are here in the audience, and I am just so proud of what they’ve done there. I take a look at this, I look at this new version, the beta will be out soon, and it will be releasing in 2011, just how easy this is going to make it for all of you to start consuming even more private cloud and take advantage of that.

OK, so now I want to transition. I want to talk about platform as a service. And where I want to start is, first of all, I believe every organization is going to have a unique journey to the cloud. Going to start from different places, they’re going to choose to consume infrastructure as a service, platform or software as a service in different ways. I think every journey is going to be unique. As I mentioned at the beginning, I think long-term, platform as a service is the destination, that’s the North Star.

And to help you understand why I say that — so what I want to talk about here is just draw some of the comparisons and help you understand how today’s infrastructure is different than what we see with platform as a service. First of all, it starts with what you actually deploy. In today’s world, you have to deploy the hardware, the compute, the storage, the network, the operating system, the VM, and once you’ve got that all done, then you can deploy the apps.

If you’re deploying VMs, you’re working in an infrastructure as a service world. In a platform as a service, it’s only the app and that’s all you worry about is the app. There’s a lot of infrastructure involved there, not only do you have to deploy it, but then as updates are required, you have to go reprovision, retest and redeploy that infrastructure time after time. In platform as a service, it’s all maintained for you, it’s all done.

Third thing, you know, with infrastructure as a service, there’s some assembly required. We do great things like these fast-track reference architectures, which dramatically slow it down, but you still have to put the pieces together. Platform as a service, that’s all done for you, it’s ready-made. These first three things are things that are just inherent capabilities, inherent advantages, if you will, of platform as a service.

The next three items I’m going to talk about, there’s some commonality between infrastructure as a service and platform as a service, but platform makes it much easier. First of all, the first thing is, you know, I’ve been into a lot of datacenters and despite I think the industry’s best effort to try to stay standardized and have it be a consistent environment. Things deviate, things stray, so what I see is, I see custom and I see an inconsistent type of thing.

Next, when you provision these applications, you have to think about what’s the peak workload. Is that an end of quarter? Is that tax season? Is that Christmas? And you have to provision enough capacity to account for that. In a platform as a service world, the application dynamically adjusts up and down as needed so you don’t have to over-provision.

Finally, in today’s world, we basically build these systems to prevent failure. We make extraordinary investments to try to do everything that we can to prevent the system from failing, but yet we know failure is going to happen. In platform as a service, we assume failure is going to happen, and the application and the infrastructure is built to be resistant to that, is built to automatically adjust.

So, if, for example, a particular piece of hardware fails, the system understands that and automatically is able to keep your application running because of the global scale, the global nature and the inherent capabilities that platform as a service brings.

Now, as you think about infrastructure as a service, that’s Windows Server. As you think about platform as a service, that’s Windows Azure. Now the first thing I want to mention is there are a lot of things that are common between these. You know, first of all, when we build Windows Azure, we start with the Windows build, the underlying components are the same, but Windows Azure was built to run on hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of servers. We’re spending billions of dollars a year right now as we are investing in growing out these datacenters around the world to host our software as a service and to host Azure so that as you develop applications, as you deploy applications into Azure, you get that geo-scale, you get that fault tolerance that’s all there.

But pieces like Visual Studio, .NET, System Center, Active Directory, these pieces are common across the two, and they will help you keep those integrated.

And then from a platform perspective, Windows Azure is incredibly open and incredibly broad. You want to use Java? Fantastic. Java will be a first-class citizen inside of Windows Azure. You want to use Ruby? Fantastic. Do that. You can choose your language, you can choose your framework, you can choose your management solution, and we’ll make sure that that is a great experience and a great opportunity inside of Windows Azure.

Now, we did a great in-depth demo of innovation as a service on Windows Server. I think that it’s important for us to spend a few minutes talking about some of the new innovation we’ve driven on Windows Azure and then give you a look into how you can use Windows Azure. To do that, I’m going to invite out James Conard — let’s give him a hand. (Applause, music.)

JAMES CONARD: Thanks, Brad, thanks a lot. Good afternoon. I’m excited to be here today to talk to you about the Windows Azure platform. Just over a week ago, we had the Professional Developers Conference. And at the PDC, we talked about several new features that we’re introducing to Windows Azure. These new features are primarily designed to make it easier for you to move application to Windows Azure, the public cloud.

Now, some of these key new features include things like VM role. VM role allows you to take a Hyper-V VHD and upload and start that up within Windows Azure. We’re also introducing elevated privileges. What elevated privileges allow you to do is to actually execute scripts at the startup of your application. So, you can do things like initialize the underlying operating system, configure different components, and even install other components you may require for your application to function, like run in MSI.

We’re also introducing Windows Server 2008 R2 and full IIS support, so you can now start running multiple IIS websites, multiple IIS virtual directories, and fully configure the IIS setting within Windows Azure.

Now, many applications that you’ll start to run out in the cloud will have a need to connect back to on-premises resources, will have the need to connect back to your exciting line-of-business systems, your existing databases. And to better support that, we’re introducing Windows Azure Virtual Network. What Virtual Network allows you to do is establish an IP-based connection between your on-premises environment and Windows Azure instances. So, you can even do things like take instances of Windows Azure and domain join them with your Active Directory system that you have on premises today.

We’ll also introduce a new Windows Azure portal experience that gives you more insight, visibility and control to manage Windows Azure applications.

Finally, for the smaller workloads that you want to run that may not require significant amount of CPU or memory resources, we’ll introduce an extra small instance that you can compose with other sizes of VMs other sizes of instances that are running Windows Azure.

All of these features will be available either as a beta or commercially available by the end of this calendar year.

In addition to these features with Windows Azure, what we’re going to do is continue to expand the portfolio of platform services that you as developers can use to build cloud applications. We kind of think of these platform services as building block services as they provide the core foundation for you to build cloud applications.

Some of these services include things like access control where you can easily integrate authentication support into your application. Authentication that supports things like Google ID, Yahoo!, Facebook and even your Active Directory system you have on premises.

We have a caching service that we’ll introduce in the cloud where you can improve the overall performance of your Web application and also manage session state in a distributed, in-memory cache.

Now, we’re going to take some other products that we have like SQL Server and SQL Server reporting, and we’re going to deploy and manage those in the cloud for you. But we’re not just taking software and installing VMs, instead, what we’re doing is building multitenant, scalable, hosted services, and that’s what we’re doing with SQL Azure reporting where you can use familiar tools to still target those services in the cloud.

Finally, because that connectivity to the on-premises environment is so important, we’re also introducing a data sync service where you can synchronize data not only across multiple SQL Azure databases in the cloud but also from your SQL Server databases on premises to and from the cloud.

So, we’re really excited about these set of platform services that we’re going to give you as developers to start using. It’s important to understand that these aren’t a mismatched set of services that we’ve acquired over time. Instead, this is a cohesive services platform, services that as developers you can just go configure and write code again. Services that are really going to allow you to build the next generation of cloud applications. We’re really just getting started. We expand to expand the portfolio of platform services that we have over time.

So, what I want to do now is instead of talking about the services and features, I actually want to show them to you in a demo. So, here what I have is an application we’ve developed that utilizes several of these new features. This application is a shipping application, allows a small and medium business or an enterprise to go and manage their shipping processes.

So, you see here on the home page, I can sign up for some various accounts. In this case, I’ll go ahead and log in using the account I’ve already established. You’ll notice that as I go over to the sign-in page, I’m not prompted for yet another user name and password; instead, we’re using the Access Control service here. And so I have the ability to use my Live ID; I have the ability to use a Google ID; I could even have my Facebook ID configured. In this case, I’m actually going to sign in using an Active Directory account that I have.

So, I’m logged into this machine as a user on the domain, and you’ll notice that because of that, I get single sign-on support, and it automatically authenticates me into the application. Allowing these cloud applications to leverage the identities that your users already have today.

So, from this application, you can see it’s running in Windows Azure. We’re using SQL Azure behind the scenes to store all of that data, and you’ll also notice, throughout this application, we’re pulling in that data that the user can interact with.

You’ll notice down here on the left-hand side that our response time for this first page request is over a second in this case, we’re pulling in some of the recent shipments.

If I go ahead and just refresh this page really quickly, what we should see is that the response time has significantly decreased on the subsequent request. That’s because here, we’re using that new caching service, and so as that data gets read off disk, it gets stored in memory, and we can improve the overall response time for our applications.

So, you’ve already seen how we’re starting to bring in some of those different platform services that we can easily use in this application. Now what I want to do is go ahead and create a new shipment. In this case, I’ll just go ahead and use this quick application to create a new international shipment so I can go ahead and ship some of my demo equipment, my laptop in particular, back to one of my colleagues in the United States.

So, I’ll just go ahead and enter in some details here. Hit next, I’ll go ahead and drop this information off at the Berlin office, this laptop, and let me go ahead and pull up some information here for Vittorio Bertacci, see if he’s in the database. Go ahead and grab Vittorio’s information. I know Vittorio’s getting ready to show this demo at Tech·Ed China in a couple weeks, so let me go ahead and ship him that laptop. So, I’m just creating a simple transaction here inside of that relational database we have, which is SQL Azure.

Now, if I scroll down here, you’ll notice the typical operations we expect in an application like this. I can print a label; I can download custom forms; I can also pull up a PDF file. And this PDF file is actually being generated inside of Windows Azure dynamically using some of the data here that I’ve entered on these forms.

Now, what’s interesting about that is how we got that component into Windows Azure. We’re using the new startup task to install this PDF component that’s packaged in MSI and install that at the initialization of our application where we can still fully take advantage of the platform as a service model that Windows Azure provides.

I’ll show you how we do that in just a minute. Let me go back over here to our application, and I’ll just go over to manage. And you’ll notice here that I can just quickly perform some queries here against our database. So, I’ll just go ahead and search for the items that I’m shipping to Vittorio, pull those up, and I can drill in here and take a look at that data. Most applications, though, have a need to not just represent data on a website, but also put that data in a more structured format that your users are used to.

So, let me go over here to the reports tab, and you’ll notice on the reports tab what we have is a list of reports that we’re pulling from SQL Azure reporting. I can go ahead and select one of those reports, and we’re actually going to execute that report in SQL Azure reporting and pull down those results into this report viewing control here.

Now, many of you probably recognize this experience because this is the same exact report-viewing control that we have today with SQL Server reporting services. So, because it’s the same control, I can also enable my users to have a familiar experience, export this report, PDF, Excel and Word, print this report off, and so forth.

And so you’ve seen this example application, how it’s running Windows Azure, how it’s using SQL Azure, and it’s starting to compose and bring in several of these new platform services. Now, what I want to do is give you kind of a behind-the-scenes view and show you how we can configure and manage this application using the new Windows Azure platform portal experience.

So, I’ll just flip over here to the new portal. In this case, I’m running a preview version of the portal that we’re going to have in your hands before the end of this year. If I go ahead and drill in here, you can see from the dashboard I have a view of my entire account information, and I can go ahead and drill in and take a look at my details for my account.

In this case, I have my shipping application that’s been deployed, and I can go ahead and see all of the details from this single experience. What you’ll also notice is that we’re giving you more visibility into some of the instances and other configuration behind Windows Azure. I can see each individual instance I have configured for my app, and I can see the status for those instances. We’re also exposing more control from this in-browser experience.

So, I can go ahead and reboot one of these individual instances. I can re-image or flatten that entire instance and redeploy my app, or I can go ahead and connect to an instance. And you’ll notice that as I select “connect to an instance,” we’re going to get the standard RDP dialogue that we know today. And what I’m actually doing here is I’m using remote desktop to connect in to an instance that’s running in Windows Azure.

So, you’ve seen how we’re starting to bring in some of those different aspects of the portal experience here. Let me go ahead and switch over to the database tab. On the database, you’ll see that we’re bringing in SQL Azure management capabilities as well. From the database, I can see some of the various subscriptions and how I have SQL Azure logical servers deployed worldwide, just using the cloud in this case. And you’ll notice that I have several different databases configured.

I can, of course, create and draw databases from here, and I can also invoke the management experience to just perform queries directly within the browser. So, you’ve seen this new portal experience, now what I want to do is just drop into Visual Studio 2010 and show you how this application was constructed.

Here, you can see a solution that contains several different projects that you’re probably familiar with in this room if you’re a developer. You’ll see that we have an ASP.NET MVC app. There’s nothing different about this application, we have controllers and views, and so forth.

What you’ll also see is I have a data tier application, or a DAQ project, as many of you may know them by that name. DAQ is a technology that is available as part of Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 today. Where I can go ahead and capture all of the schema information, including my tables and store procedures, and generate a deployable unit. A deployable unit represents my database structure that I can deploy to my on-premises SQL Server environment or in this case to SQL Azure.

I’ll scroll up here, and I’ll show you another project — in this case, a data tier project. And you’ll notice that I’m just using the entity framework in this case to access my SQL Azure database. Familiar technologies and tools that we know today as developers.

What I’m going to also do now is expand this other project that you may not be familiar with, which is a cloud service project. We’ve shipped several releases of the cloud services tools for Visual Studio, and I’m running a preview version of the tools that will be in your hand before the end of the calendar year.

You can see that I have my roles configured, and I also have the ability to just drill into some of this configuration information. This project captures all the metadata and configuration information I need to describe how I want my application to run inside of Windows Azure, how it takes advantage of that platform.

You’ll notice here that I have my shipping Web application, I can specify the number of instances here, and I can go ahead and change some of the settings, including remote desktop and enable that.

Now, after I make some changes to this application, I’m ready to go ahead and package it up. But you remember that we had that PDF component. So, let me go ahead and drop into our service definition here. The service definition contains another level of metadata where we can go ahead and capture things like the port settings that we need to have open within Windows Azure.

What you’ll notice here is that we have a new startup task where we can go ahead and install and initialize that PDF component. That startup task is just executing a batch file here, and I can just go ahead and open up that batch file and see here that we’re just running an MSI in silent mode. So, this is a great way for you to go ahead and deploy components that you may need for your application whether it be COM components, third-party components, access registry settings, and so forth.

So, once I’m done changing my application here, I can just go ahead and right-click on the cloud app, and I can select “publish.” And you’ll notice as a developer, I have the ability to directly deploy this application straight to Windows Azure, or I can choose to just create a service package here where I can hand it over to my operations, and they can deploy it for me.

So, you’ve seen some of the tools and the experience that we’re providing as part of Visual Studio 2010. Packaging up applications is a great way to easily go and deploy changes, but what these new platform services really allow you to do is to go in and configure those services and add more value to your applications without having to deploy an entire application.

I’ll switch over here to the Business Intelligence Development Studio, a tool that you know as part of SQL Server 2008 R2 today. Now, this tool is used to actually go in and create reports that I can go and deploy against SQL Server Reporting Services if I’m on-premises. What I’ve done here is I’ve just changed the end point where I want to publish these reports to. I’ve changed the URL here to point to SQL Azure reporting. You’ll notice I have a new report here called international shipment, so let me go ahead and just select deploy.

As I select deploy, you’ll notice here that I’ll get prompted to go ahead and log into SQL Azure reporting. Going to enter my credentials here, and we’re actually deploying the RDF files that represent those reports into our SQL Azure reporting environment.

If I go back over here to our application, you’ll notice that our application is dynamically pulling in those lists of reports from SQL Azure reporting. As I refresh, you can see that new report is discovered from SQL Azure reporting, and I can drill in and see some of those international shipments.

And so, you see an example of how these new services allow you to quickly configure them and add functionality to your applications without deploying and writing a lot of code. In fact, if I wanted to add additional identity providers here, I could simply configure the access control service to support those without having to deploy a significant amount of code for my application.

So, before I wrap up the demo, there’s one final thing I want to show you. I know many of you in this room are using System Center today. So, what I want to do is show you how we’re taking System Center and we’re integrating support for Windows Azure. Here you can see I’m flipping over to a System Center environment and inside of System Center Operations Manager, I have a diagram view that represents from shipping application.

Let me go ahead and just expand this view here, and I’ll point out a few key things on this diagram view. You’ll notice on the left-hand side, I have my databases where I can monitor those SQL Azure databases and their availability. In the center, I have some watcher components, which are providing that outside-in monitoring to ensure that my application is available and it’s responsive for my users. And on the right-hand side, you can see I have my Web role with my two instances that are configured.

So, it looks like I have an alert here. So, let me go ahead and just select this item. And I’ll go ahead and drill in and take a look at the performance view and see what’s going on with this particular set of roles.

Here, in this case, you can see I’m getting a significant number of ASP.NET page requests from my instances. So, what I want to do is actually take action against that. Now, instead of making you go to a separate portal experience, what we’re doing with this management pack is integrating control and the ability to execute tasks that interact with Windows Azure directly from System Center.

You’ll notice I can go and select the “add Web role” instances option here. And I’m just going to increment the number of instances from our current two to go ahead and go to four. As I run this task, what we’re doing here within the management pack is communicating out with Windows Azure and increasing those number of instances. If I go back to our diagram view here, let me go ahead and force a refresh, and now you see that there are two additional instances that have been added into our Web role.

Now, those instances will take a few minutes to actually spin up and start up, and, once they do so, they’ll automatically be added to the load balancer that Windows Azure provides and start serving up some of the incoming requests. And so, that will take a few minutes here.

So, what we’ve seen throughout this demo is kind of in the end-to-end view about how we’re providing a comprehensive set of services and tools for building Windows Azure applications. You first saw an example of an application that not only ran in the cloud, but also used some of these new platform services like access control, like caching, like reporting. You also saw how inside of Visual Studio 2010 I could use the .NET framework, familiar tools and familiar technologies to build these Windows Azure applications.

Finally, what you saw is how we can go and manage, configure, and get more insight into our Windows Azure applications both in an online experience within the browser, also with System Center on our desktops.

With that, thank you for your time. (Applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON: Thanks, James. Let me re-emphasize a couple of points that James made. Familiar tools, same development tools. Familiar tools, same infrastructure tools like System Center that you use to manage that. And that management pack for Azure is available in its release candidate form right now, you can download that from the Web if you’re developing an application for Azure and want to monitor that through System Center.

The other point I want to make is we talk about Windows Azure as our platform as a service offering, that’s obviously available today running from within Microsoft datacenters — we actually have Azure running in six datacenters around the world. We will also make Windows Azure available to run in your datacenters and your partners’ datacenters with what we call the Windows Azure Appliance when that becomes available. So, you make the choice when you want to use infrastructure, platform as a service, and then we’ll enable you to run that where you want to.

Let’s kind of bring it all together now. We talked about this journey and we talked about every organization starting from a unique place and taking a unique way in which they move to the cloud. You need to have that opportunity and that choice to choose when you want to use infrastructure or platform or application as a service. The reality is I think we’re going to be living in a world when the majority of you, the vast majority of you are going to be using all of them.

As you’re using all of them, you want to ensure that you have the flexibility to move as you want to, but also that you have a consistent and cohesive way to how you develop to and how you manage that.

That’s where we want to have the final demo for the day. With that, we’re going to invite Vlad Joanovic to come out and show you bringing this all together. (Music, applause.)

VLAD JOANOVIC: Thank you and good afternoon. We know that many of you are going to need to monitor your applications across many different IT scenarios. What I’d like to show here today is how System Center monitoring can help you monitor all of your critical applications and the dependent components, regardless of where or how they are deployed.

In this view here, you can see that I’m monitoring all of FabriCam IT’s applications, including the Azure applications with the Azure management pack, applications in our Berlin datacenter, including applications that Greg deployed to our private cloud. Hybrid applications that combine Azure components with components from our Berlin datacenter, like the FabriCam shipping application that James just described. Also, applications in our partner datacenter like this partner datacenter here in Frankfurt.

Now, it looks like I have a problem in my Berlin datacenter, and as I drill into it, it’s in my ERP application; drilling a little bit further, I see that there’s a problem in my ASP.NET component. The other critical component that this application depends on are the storage and also the end-user experience.

The storage, in this case, is being monitored by the Dell EqualLogic Management Pack, which also provides a separate diagram view here where I can see the health of all of my storage components, I can pivot to the alerts, or to the EqualLogic console task right here.

Drilling back into my ASP.NET application, I can see that I’ve got some problems in this ASP.NET app, and this is where we’ve heard your feedback around the challenges and complexities of building and maintaining management packs and adding additional custom instrumentation to your .NET applications. This is where we’re really excited to announce that based on the new AVIcode technologies that we recently acquired, you IT pros out there don’t need to get the deep insight into your applications, find problems in these applications without the need for a custom management pack or additional custom instrumentation, which should be great news for your developers out there.

For the purposes of this demo, my ASP.NET app here is actually the common application sample called Dinner Now, which is made up of ASP.NET, WCF and SQL Server. And when I refresh the page here, you can see that it’s really slow. It wasn’t this slow yesterday, and these type of performance problems are really common and challenging to investigate and solve, especially in production applications when it’s an intermittent problem. It results in lots of finger pointing. Was it the front end, the middle tier, the back end or an underlying infrastructure problem?

How many IT pros out there have heard developers say, “Well, it worked on my machine.” Or, “I’ve actually never seen this problem in test or production.” Well, this is where the AVIcode technologies shine, as it lets you IT pros out there identify and isolate the problem and get the right information to your development team so that they can solve the problem quickly.

In the AVIcode Web console here, I see the .NET applications I’m monitoring, various metrics about them like the number of monitored requests, number of performance events. I can drill into this and actually drill into a particular transaction that’s causing a problem.

In this view, I can see the execution of this particular transaction. I can see that the SQL store procedure is actually taking the longest amount of time in this transaction. I can see the inputs that are flowing into this SQL store procedure.

You can share this with your application development team so that they can solve the problem. Remember, application devs out there, you didn’t need to change anything to the application to see this information.

Now, many of our customers have been using AVIcode for a number of years, including Microsoft IT and our Xbox operations group. They’ve been able to dramatically reduce the amount of time between finding a problem in production and solving that problem.

Now, it just isn’t problems that AVIcode can help you discover; it can also help you understand when your application is running optimally. Here’s a performance graph that we recently received from the Xbox operations group for one of their key applications that was taken during the week of a major triple-A game launch, which you know happens Tuesdays. And they saw the number of requests double from 6 million to 12 million in this application.

And during this entire process, they were able to identify that the request time stayed absolutely flat. So, AVIcode helped them understand that their application was optimally deployed, both optimally developed and optimally deployed, giving them the confidence in their application.

As you’ve see here today, System Center monitoring can help you monitor all of your applications from Azure to your datacenter applications, to manage these apps through this exciting transition. Thank you, and have a great Tech·Ed. (Applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON: Thanks, Vlad. As you’re thinking about the cloud, you’re thinking about infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service, but I hope you take away from this afternoon, Microsoft has a very strong view on this, and we have the most comprehensive view and vision in the market about how we enable you to use infrastructure or platform or service. You make the choice on what’s best for your business, and then we’ll enable you to run, for example, Windows Server or Windows Azure in your datacenters, in your partners’ datacenters, in our datacenters.

Steve has made the comment about we’re “all-into” the cloud. Over 70 percent of our development resources worldwide are focused on the cloud. Remember, we invest more in R&D than any other organization in the world. We’re driving a great deal of innovation in the cloud; we’re connecting that with how our end users want to do their work and with the devices on which they want to do that work.

If you start out with this diagram, looking back at a picture of the past. In the past, we had this major transition from how power was generated from water and from steam and other things to electricity. We’re standing at the forefront of a similar type of economic change. The cloud brings with it new opportunities. The cloud brings with it new responsibilities. And certainly with that, the cloud brings with it new choices for you.

You know, we’re humbled by the opportunity to work with all of you and for the partnership that you give us in your businesses and helping to partner with you. You know, I think about what are the pictures in the future going to look like? 100 years from now when they look back at 2010, what are the pictures going to look like, and what are they going to look like going forward? I know one thing for certain — the cloud is in the future, we hope to earn the opportunity to partner more deeply with your business, we believe the innovation that we’re driving are going to enable you to differentiate your businesses, differentiate yourselves and your careers. We’re humbled and we’re grateful for the opportunity to partner with you, and look to deepen that. Thank you very much; thank you for coming.