ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Microsoft corporate vice president Brad Anderson. (Applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON: Good morning, TechEd! (Cheers.) Boy, we are excited to be here. You know, I’ve got to tell you that was one of the funnest things I think I’ve ever done. I’ve got to check that off the bucket list. But we’re excited to be here. We’re grateful that you would spend this time with us.

You know, one quick thing, you know, many of you may ask, hey, where can I get that application that’s the tear-away tux. It’s exclusively available in the Windows Phone marketplace. (Laughter.)

(Alarm rings.)

Oh, that’s right, I got here just in time.

When you think about it for a minute, ladies and gentlemen, it really comes down to this right now. What we spend our time doing, everyone in this room, everyone listening to this across the world, we spend our time making others great. It’s what we do.

And I love, I just absolutely love the aspect of what we do as our job. We spend our time making sure that users can get the data they need, the applications they need, that experience that enables them to do great things.

And that really is what this keynote is about today. This keynote is about taking advantage and seizing that opportunity that all of these significant trends across the industry present for us.

What you’re going to see today is you’re going to see significant innovations. You’re going to see announcements of releases and updates to every one of our major products that run in your data centers, and we’re going to walk you through what that looks like.

So let’s get going.

So let me give you a roadmap of what the morning is going to look like. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to start out and we’re going to start talking about devices, and we’re going to cover the innovation and the work that we’re doing in Windows 8 and with our partners.

And then we’re going to start to talk about the services that we’re building to light up those devices, and we’re going to talk about what we do to enable your users across all of their devices, so you can embrace the trends around the BYO scenarios.

These users and these devices, they all want great apps. So we’re going to talk about the innovations in Azure and in Visual Studio that enable you to build great and rich applications.

Now, all these applications, they generate incredible amounts of data. And there are insights in that data if we just unlock it. So we’re going to talk about the work in SQL and the work that we’re doing to enable you to unlock all of the insights in the data across all of your enterprise capabilities and your partners in the cloud.

And finally, we’re going to talk about the cloud platform. You need a cloud platform across your data centers, your service providers, and across the public cloud that really allows you to host all of these services.

So that’s the roadmap for the next two hours.

And I’ll tell you we’ve brought the best and the brightest with us today to do this. Literally we have brought the engineering leaders from across Windows and Windows Server, System Center, Azure, SQL, dev-div, the leaders that literally define the strategy, set the pace, define the future of our investments.

And let’s get started, and what we’re going to do is we’re going to start talking about Windows, and we’re going to invite Iain McDonald from the Windows team to the stage to give us an overview.

Iain, how are you doing?

IAIN MCDONALD: Hey, Brad. How are you?

BRAD ANDERSON: Good.

IAIN MCDONALD: Are you going to give me that?

BRAD ANDERSON: You’ve got it.

IAIN MCDONALD: Hi there. I’m Iain McDonald. I’m in the Windows core group at Microsoft. You can see my email there if you really want to give me feedback later on.

Our group makes the kernel virtualization, file systems, storage, security and identity bits for Windows, but not just Windows. We make it for all the things that basically Microsoft’s releasing these days, from phones to the recently announced Xbox One, to embedded, to Windows Server which we’ve been doing for a very long time, and all the way up to Windows Azure which is all running on Windows Server 2012 these days.

We really feel that our operating system is something that’s very malleable. The fact that we’re able to go and do all that stuff is actually something pretty cool.

But, you know, Windows is our core business, and Windows is a thing that allows us to be able to go and move between going from this super locked down environment, you know, like banks, three-letter agencies whose names I can’t mention, various other people, all the way to what’s the choice for the hard-core gamer at home. He’s going to be playing — he or she is going to be playing his game on Windows.

And, you know, it’s really everything in between as well. You can go and take that device into work, you can go and put it in your environment that’s a little bit more secure if you need to, you can take it out and you can really go and get into the BYOD thing.

Now, Brad’s going to talk a little later about some of the BYOD stuff, but in the end the important thing is Windows is the thing that powers the device that allows you to get to your stuff. And your stuff can be on many different things, whether it’s a phone or whether it’s Windows or whether it’s sitting up in the cloud, and it allows you to be — Windows is the best place to be able to go and get into all of those things.

Now, we’ve had Windows 8 out for eight months so far. We’ve been getting lots of feedback. We’ve sold over 100 million copies, a few more than that, but we’ll announce some numbers later this month. We’ve got over 70,000 apps in the store, and we know we’ve got hundreds of millions of downloads of those apps.

And are we happy with it? Yeah, we’re happy with it. There’s a lot of things going on.

Enough of my yakking about it. Why don’t we look at what some customers are doing and they’ll tell us themselves?

(Video segment.)

IAIN MCDONALD: So the thing we loved about that — a bunch of us in the engineering team watched some of these videos the other week. The thing we loved about it is hearing what Hoyt from Sheraton was saying, which is Windows 8 is allowing him to have a business that gets improved over time.

And, you know, we’re going to improve our business over time. If you’re living under a rock in the last year, you probably would have heard — especially in the tech industry you probably would have heard people not liking things that were taken out of Windows or there are some people now that we’ve announced Windows 8.1 not liking we’ve put things back into Windows.

We are releasing Windows 8.1 this year. It’s a free upgrade from Windows 8. And the preview bits will be available on June 26th.

Now, one of the big things for us is the fact that it is compatible, and it’s really compatible. We said when we released Windows 8 that anything that ran on Windows 7 would run on Windows 8, and that’s true. And that compatibility continues today. So anything that runs on Windows 8 obviously runs on Windows 8.1.

And you can do a lot more to personalize the experience in Windows 8.1. You can see up there there’s different tile sizes than we’ve had in the past. There’s the idea that the Start screen might have your personalized background. It’s the background that would be on the desktop for you, a lot of those sorts of things.

Now, today I’m not going to go and do a full deep UI demo — time constraints, and we’ve also got the BUILD conference coming up that all that stuff will be streamed down. I’m going to show you some things that I think get lost sometimes when we talk to the sort of consumer-focused press, and I’m going to show you some things that we’ve done that are more focused on the business world. And there’s a lot more that I’m going to go and show. You probably also don’t want the UI demos done by the kernel guy.

So here we go. I’m going to show you some stuff.

First of all, I’ve got a machine here for a user named Sarah. And Sarah is in one of the call center groups at Microsoft.

Hopefully we’ve switched onto machine one. I did it. Look at that.

And, you know, one of the things that we’ve heard feedback from in Windows 8 is that it’s a little easy to mess up your Start screen tiles. I have five-year old daughters; they do it to me all the time.

So one of the things that we’ve gone and done is we’ve put in an ability for you to just when you hold down a tile it will bring up a customization option. And lovely, so customized there, and that’s how you get to go and move things around rather than setting things by default.

But Sarah’s manager doesn’t want me to go and actually give her any ability to be able to go and move things around.

So moving across to the next machine, No. 3, I’ve got a setup here that I’ve set a configuration for her of specific sets of apps and specific sets of tiles that are there. So you know, we’ve got a basic set of stuff. We’ve got some work apps. We’ve got Office sitting there.

And what I’m going to do is I’m going to go and export that. And I’ve gone and done this using PowerShell. So I’ll go and export the layout. I’ll export it to XML and stick it on a server.

So here we go. Bang, that’s done.

Now I’m going to move back over to my server, and I’m going to have a look at the policies that I’ve got in place on there. And I’m going to go and select this Start screen layout policy. And I’m going to go and enable it. And I’m going to paste the path to that layout file I just had, and I’m going to enable it.

So what I’ve gone and done is I’ve said Sarah, this user that I don’t want to be giving all that much control to, has a specific layout. I’ve exported the layout from this machine. I’ve set the policy up. And now I’ll go back to Sarah’s machine, and I’ll go into the command prompt, group policy update/force. I’ll go and do that.

By the way, whenever I go and do something like this, and I’ve got to type, everybody sees that like I’m a kind of crappy typer. And so that’s why I always go and sort of preload it up.

Now I’m just going to log off and we’re going to log back in to Sarah, which we go dog, dog, stick thing. Look at that. And I messed up the picture password.

Actually a bunch of the Microsoft — and there I go. I’m setting into the place that does that. (Applause.)

Now, one of the other things that we have actually done with Windows 8.1, which if you’ve been reading Paul Thurrott’s column you’d know about, is we have a thing called Assigned Access which we’ll be providing in Windows 8.1, which will give you the ability to lock down Windows even more.

For example, if you’re at school and you’ve got an application that is running an exam, you don’t want them to be able to go to a browser, or if you want to be able to provide a digital sign or you want to be able to go and do any of those sorts of things where there’s a single app going on, and it provides just access to a single Windows Store app. And we really think that that’s actually something that a lot of people are going to do.

Windows 8.1 Industry Edition, which is from the embedded line, will provide a bunch more customization in that space.

So one of the things for us is we think that this is a commitment, it’s a commitment to the business, it’s a commitment to the stuff that we’ve been doing. And we’ve been doing it for a long while. Personally, I’ve been on Windows 15 years. I think that we’ve seen different things that we’ve gone and released in different levels of success but we feel that the path we’re on is continually getting better.

And my group in the core is really focused on every release we’re going to get better performance, we’re going to get a smaller system, we’re going to continue to be able to go broader and broader.

But we also believe that building the best device for business and building the best tablet and building the best laptop is core for what we’re doing.

And we’re working a lot with people to be able to go and bring out Windows Store apps for business, so line-of-business apps, and really go and allow them to be able to go and easily and simply build in the level of security that you need these days.

Now, as I said before, Brad’s going to do a whole bunch of stuff on BYOD in a little while, and I’ll leave some of that up to him, but I want to talk about some of the stuff that we’re doing for mobility.

Now, really I think that when you talk about mobility, a lot of the problems that you end up having or a lot of the things that you’ve got to go and deal with really go through to everywhere you go it’s kind of a pain in the — it’s kind of a pain to go and hook up to different systems. I didn’t swear. I didn’t swear. I know it’s an interesting change for me.

So one of the big problems that came along or comes along for us is whenever I go somewhere else and I want to just go and display, I don’t know about you guys but in our place we’ve got like 37 different cables you’ve got to go and plug in and you’ve got to go and work out which one is the right one, and then eventually you display 10 minutes into the meeting time that you’ve got allocated.

So what we’ve gone and done is we’ve built in support for Miracast in Windows 8.1. And Miracast is really a great sort of PowerPoint display technology.

Actually what I’m going to do is I’m just going to pair this machine up right here. And let’s flick to showing the pairing. OK, so it’s connecting right now.

So Miracast is one of these technologies that’s great. It’s not really a thing that you’re going to go and want to have sitting in your desk and always be the way that you’re connecting to your screen in your office, but it’s great for that sort of conference room or presentation area one, because there is a bit of a lag that comes in.

But I’ve just gone and done that, and I’ve flicked onto this machine. And there’s a little lag here. So slide over, slide back, and now I’m going to open PowerPoint. And look at that, pictures of my kids. I had to do that. I was going to sort of rock and roll you but I didn’t have any sound, so it didn’t really work.

OK, so that’s that one.

OK, the second one that I want to show you that just like I think this is the most ridiculous thing that in 2013 I’m going to do a demo of printing, OK? I just will admit that. But what we’ve gone and done here is we’ve got an old printer. It’s Wi-Fi enabled but it’s not really enabled for much else.

And what I’m going to go and do is I’m going to connect to this with — I’ve got a passive NFC tag that we’ve created on top of this. So I’m going to pair this machine up to it.

Oh, look at this, add a device. It’s going to add the device. It’s going to take a little time. We’re in prerelease build. It takes a little time to do that at the moment, but it’s going to add a device as I’m standing here talking going blah, blah, blah at you. It’s always the interesting part of the demo is when you’ve got the devices taking a little bit of time to synch up.

Did I get this? OK, come on, you’re going to do it for me.

OK, so I’ve got the device, and I’m going to go into mail. And what I’ve got here is I’ve got the mail app in Windows 8.

And one of the things that you’ll see that we’ve actually gone and done in Windows 8.1 is we’ve got the ability for apps to go and open up side by side. So I have my airplane boarding pass that’s sitting in my mail account, and I’ve gone and selected that, and I’m going straight in and I’m going to go and select and print it, and it will print.

OK, so we’re going to — it’s going to print. (Laughter.) It’s always like incredible. You know, like the number of wireless networks we saw in here yesterday, over time it was taking more and more time to be able to go and print with the more machines we brought in. So it’s going to print, but it’s — my print server is sitting OK. It is going to print.

Well, we’ll move on to the next thing and then we’ll come back to that. (Laughter.) It is going to print, I’ll tell you this.

OK, so what I’ve got here is I’ve got a Surface Pro machine sitting here, and it’s sitting and it’s not connected to the net. So you can see that by how it’s not displayed.

So I’m going to flick over to this machine, and I have set up a tether. I’ve turned on mobile broadband on this machine.

If I flick back to the first machine, in a moment you’ll actually see that it’s coming back to tether two — coming back. There’s tether two. It’s coming up. Connected. OK, and you’ll see in a second that it’s connected.

And the idea is that we know that users have this problem of, one, in a lot of places Wi-Fi is not as cheap as America. Sorry to tell you that. You get a really great deal in America for cheap Wi-Fi. And we know that a lot of people want to be able to go and use mobile broadband to be able to go and connect.

So we’ve simplified the way that you can go and connect and tether up, and tether up off other systems. And generally we go and say that up to 10 systems you’ll be kind of OK, get OK perf, but not — you know, when you get to about eight or nine you’re going to sort of find that it goes a little slow.

But one of the other things that we’ve gone and done is we’ve built in with Windows 8.1 the ability for app writers to go and build in a VPN directly into the system, and build it in directly to their apps. So rather than having system-wide VPN, an app writer can go and do that.

So I’ve got this app here. It’s called Rounds. It’s one of our demo apps. And it goes and says that I’ve got to go and have a VPN when I go and connect in.

Now, one of the cool things that we’ve gone and done with that is we’ve also wired it up through a virtual smart card. And so you can, if you want to go and be able to put in multifactor auth and build it into the app or build it into your infrastructure, you’re really able to go and build that up and be able to go and put all that sort of stuff in.

So I’m going to flick back to slides. And my printing — I’m going to have to find out — the printing does work. (Laughter.) Really, it’s like 23rd — and of all the things — like I’ve got all this other stuff that was going to break down on me, and 23rd in the printing demo takes longer. I’m going to get those printing guys. (Laughter.)

OK, one of the things I really wanted to talk about is what came up for security, and what’s coming up for security. I don’t think there’s a day going by at the moment where we’re sort of seeing security is an issue and people are getting hacked and all that sort of stuff.

And way back in after we released XP we stopped our development of Server 2003 and created this thing called the Secure Development Lifecycle. And I remember when we created that, you know, we set in place a bunch of aims that we wanted to be able to get to Server 2003, XP SP3, blah, blah, blah, but we also had these long range aims that we wanted to get to.

And we really got to a place that people who were running that project said, you know, it’s going to take us 10 years to get there. And we knew that at the time.

Windows 8 is the release that I believe that we’ve delivered on those original aims that we’ve put in place.

And you know what, the game’s changed for us now. The game has hugely changed. And for us I think that like I will never stand up here and promise that we’ve created an unbreakable system. No one should promise that, because there are a lot of people out there, there’s a lot of very professional people and organized people who are creating attacks on the system these days.

So I really don’t think that we should ever promise that, but what we can promise is that we’ve moved from having a defensive nature of where we are versus the attacks, and we’re moving into an offensive nature.

And you’ll see a lot more of what we’re going and doing with Windows 8.1 over the next couple of months, but really we go and say security is something that you should add into your view of the world over the next year, and there are some very important things.

OK, my final thing I want to do is I want to go and show you a couple of machines that are coming out or a couple machines you may have heard of.

Look at this thing. This is huge. This is called a Panasonic Magic Board. And this is a 20-inch LCD display, does 3840×2560, and it does an aspect ratio of 15:10.

I have my funny joke is that I get to be able to go Windows, Windows, Windows. (Laughter.) I’ll be looking for a new job next week. (Laughter.)

The second one that we’ve got here is — I was actually warned about doing that, and there’s a couple of PR people at the back who are having kittens right now. (Laughter.)

We have this machine that’s called a Toshiba KIRAbook. Got some actually awesome reviews on The Verge and a couple other places in the last week. 2560×1440, 13-inch display. This is an awesome display. And it’s also got this smudge proof thing which actually is kind of cool and it works pretty well. And it’s funny, because you’re sort of like you expect it to smudge up and it’s actually really good.

This is kind of one of the best ultrabooks that we’ve seen so far. And it’s really solid, too. It’s a thumpy solid sort of thing.

This guy here is a Lenovo Helix. And I think one of the big problems with systems that end up being tablets is the hinges are kind of funny. So this hinge here, they call it rip and flip, but you can go and do this. And this is a sort of solid hinge thing. So it actually turns into a laptop pretty well. It’s got a TPM, it’s got a Core i5 in it. This is actually a machine that I can see a lot of people doing sort of serious business stuff could actually really go and do. And it’s got this other weird mode where you can flip it around but we’re not going to.

And then a final one, which you probably would have heard that was announced this morning by Acer, is the world’s first 8.1 tablet, industry-focused tablet. It’s called the Iconia W3.

So this has full PC capabilities, comes with Office installed. This is the Home and Student version of Office. And it’s going to everything. It will run all your old apps and all that sort of stuff. It’s running an Atom, so there’s a lot of stuff in terms of long battery life.

And this keyboard, even though it kind of looks a bit funky, is actually a decent full-sized keyboard and actually works for us.

So there’s a couple of machines that we’ve got coming — our OEMs have coming up over the next couple of months. There’s a couple of interesting different things in there. And hopefully you’ll go out and buy a couple, eh?

Hopefully I’ll see you guys at the reception tonight or something like that. Thanks very much. Where’s Brad? (Applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON: Great job, man.

IAIN MCDONALD: Thanks, Brad.

BRAD ANDERSON: All right, Iain McDonald, one of my absolute favorite people at Microsoft, and I hope he’s still at Microsoft after that demo. (Laughter.)

So listen, Windows 8.1, these tablets, as we built these tablets, we built them with all of you, with IT in mind. So the manageability, the security, the protection, all the things that you’ve known and you’ve become accustomed to in Windows is included inside of these tablets. So when we make statements that, hey, the best tablets for the enterprise, the best tablets for our industry, this is why we say that.

Let me give you one quick anecdote, personal anecdote about Windows 8, and this is one of kind of those moments where as a father you kind of become a hero to your children. You know, we’ve got a couple of all-in-ones at home. We have a number of Surface devices, of RT devices.

And the first time I showed my children they could log in on any one of the devices and through the integration that we’ve done with Microsoft Account and with SkyDrive, Office 365, their settings followed them across the devices, their data was available anywhere. Never again am I going to get one of those phone calls where they’re at school or at a friend’s house and I’ve got to email them a document or help them get the latest version of Office because it all follows them. Talk about a proud moment where their geeky father became a hero, you know, it’s one of those moments. I would encourage you to do the same.

So let’s talk for a minute about the next transition, evolution, of our story here. We’ve talked about devices, and the great devices that we’re building. Now let’s transition and start to talk about some of the services that enable these devices to be used in the enterprise. And so you step back for a minute and just kind of think about what’s happening in all of your worlds. Your worlds are getting incredibly more complex, whether that be in the data center or whether that would be with what your users are using.

But let me give you just a couple of data points that I think kind of bring it all home. Since we met a year ago at TechEd, there have been 1.2 billion smart devices sold around the world; 50 percent of IT organizations have been mandated to support consumer devices for their CXOs; 50 percent of all of our employees, our workers, in their 20s believe that BYO is a right, not a privilege, a right. And to me the one that hit home the most is in the research that we’ve been doing, we’re seeing that over 80 percent of organizations around the world are not increasing budget, are not increasing IT, but forcing and demanding they support the BYO scenarios. So the bottom line is we have to be more efficient. We have to be more effective. We have to leverage the capabilities that we already have in place.

So as we’ve been building our next set of investments, we thought about how can we really enable and help the world to embrace these trends, because these trends around BYO are wonderful, they’re marvelous. It really helps you to help your users be the most productive, the most happy, and when that’s the case great things and magic happens. So these are the principles that we set out to do. We really focused heavily on the end user experience, and we’ve built a great, and rich, and simple end user experience that allows your users to get access to their applications and data across all of their devices.

We really focused on helping you to unify your environment. If you think for a minute about the number of infrastructures that you have and you deploy globally, you have email, you’ve got Active Directory, you’ve got System Center. How do we build on top of those and allow you to get more benefit and more value out of that? And, finally, a focus as always on security and protecting the corporate assets.

So now let’s actually dig in a little bit and talk about the actual strategy and what we’re doing to enable this. And it all starts with the identity. Everything, everything starts with the identity of that user inside of Active Directory. If you think about it, the authoritative source for the enterprise identity has been Active Directory for many, many years. The majority of the world is using that. I’ve got my consumer identity, and I’ve got my identity at Microsoft. Everything is based upon that.

We’ve now cloud optimized Active Directory with Windows Azure Active Directory. So now we can extend your capabilities of Active Directory to the cloud with you in complete control about what you want to have appear inside of that Azure Active Directory. Office 365, Azure, Windows Intune all authenticate against Active Directory, and Azure Active Directory specifically.

Now let me give you a couple of interesting data points. Since we released Azure Active Directory, we’ve had over 265 billion authentications. It takes about, what, two minutes to brew a cup of coffee, in those two minutes Azure Active Directory will have serviced over a million authentication requests for users and devices around the world. We service more than 9,000 requests per second with Azure Active Directory. And there’s more than 420,000 unique domains that have been uploaded and now represented inside of Azure Active Directory. So everything starts there. We’ve cloud optimized Active Directory with Azure Active Directory.

So the next piece in the puzzle is we also now have cloud-optimized System Center with Windows Intune. Now the majority of you use System Center Configuration Manager to manage your PCs. It’s far and away the most commonly used tool. So what we’ve now built is we’ve built a set of capabilities in Azure that we call Windows Intune, and we’ve connected Configuration Manager and Intune. Now you’ve got a solution that allows you to what we call manage your devices where they live.

These consumer devices, they were built to consume the cloud. They’re always on. They’re always connected. So with Windows Intune as long as you’ve got a connection to the Internet, these devices can be managed, your users can get what they need to be productive. And the fact that we’ve connected them, we now give you the ability to leverage the existing skills and capabilities you have in System Center Configuration Manager, extend it to the cloud with a cloud-optimized mobile device management solution.

One interesting data point that you might want to hear about Intune, we have more than 35,000 unique tenants, organizations, who are using that right now, and it is literally just growing like a weed. So what you get here then is a consistent experience that gives you the ability to manage your PCs and your devices in one console experience, one set of capabilities, not separate infrastructures.

Now we started this one with Aston Martin, I would encourage you to go up and take a few minutes and read some of the things that Aston Martin has published on how they’re using the different capabilities from Microsoft. Aston Martin has 145 different dealerships in 41 different countries, and they were struggling with how do you enable users to bring in their own PCs and devices? Those devices could be Windows Phone, iOS and Android devices.

In February when they learned about what we had done with Windows Intune and using it to connect to the Config Manager, they deployed and took advantage of Intune. Now they manage all of their employees’ devices, and they have enabled BYO for all their users’ devices. They’re managing over 800 devices, Windows, iOS and Android with the cloud-based Intune solution doing all the command and control from their System Center Configuration Management Console on-premises. So just a wonderful, wonderful solution in doing that.

Listen, I am pleased to announce this morning the release and the preview that will be available of Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center Configuration Manager, and System Center 2012 R2, and the latest update to Windows Intune. These are significant updates to the 2012 releases. We’ve done this in less than a year. We’ve packed in way more than a year’s worth of innovation in these products.

I want to give you just a quick insight into some of the things that we’ve done here. And one of the significant changes that we made in our processes is we did common planning across Windows, Windows Server, System Center, and Intune. Common milestones, a common set of planning capabilities, last summer and fall, common cadence, common milestones. We’re all on the exact same page. And what that has enabled us to do is it has enabled us to bring out more features more rapidly, more end-to-end scenarios.

The other change and the other thing that’s significantly driving this is our cloud first principle from an engineering perspective. From a design, from an engineering architectural perspective, we want to design everything for the cloud, for the scalability, for the reliability and the availability that is needed in the cloud, and then bring that on premises.

So what you’re seeing here is kind of a culmination of all the things that we’ve learned in operating these 200 plus services that are running at cloud scale, and Azure, and as we’ve learned how to do that, and as we’ve innovated in the cloud, now bring that on premises for you to run in your data centers through these technologies. And that is one of the things that is enabling us to do this rapid cadence, and get value out to you faster.

Do you want to see some of the new capabilities in these R2 releases and Windows Intune? (Applause.)

All right. So to do that, let’s invite Molly out. Molly is going to kind of give us a walkthrough of some of the innovations. Give her a hand.

(Applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON: Molly, how are you doing?

MOLLY BROWN: I’m doing well. Thank you, Brad.

BRAD ANDERSON: Thanks for doing this for us this morning.

MOLLY BROWN: Good morning, everyone. Users bringing their personal devices into the workplace is no longer just a trend. It’s a reality that everyone in this room is facing. And we know it’s hard. It’s hard to give users access to the resources they need to remain productive while ensuring that your company doesn’t suffer a breach of sensitive information that will end up on the front page of the newspaper.

So we in the Windows Server, System Center, and Windows Intune engineering teams have been working very hard on this problem. And today I’m going to show you the new solutions that we will bring to market with the R2 wav of releases.

BRAD ANDERSON: That’s great.

MOLLY BROWN: These will help you empower your users to work from the devices that they want while remaining in control. So let’s take a look. Right here I’ve got my personal tablet device running Windows 8.1 that I brought into work. And I want to access my team’s SharePoint site. So I will just navigate down to here, provide my corporate credentials, log in, and here we go. Access denied. But the interesting  but it’s actually now prompting me to do something called Joining My Workplace.

So this is a new feature in Windows Server 2012 R2 that we allow users to workplace join their devices to their Active Directory.

BRAD ANDERSON: Yes, let me just kind of add onto that a little bit. What we’ve done now with all these capabilities is allow you to put policy first and foremost on the user’s identity and then also based on the identity of the device. So while Molly has access to the SharePoint site and all the data there, the device itself today is unknown to the domain. And so we’re not granting access. Think about what we just talked about here in this workplace join as a modern domain join, where users can now come and subscribe, or let the service know about their devices, so now IT has a view of all the devices that are associated with the user. So let’s actually see what it looks like.

MOLLY BROWN: Exactly. I will now  doing that actual setup of the workplace join is very simple. I just go through here to settings, the PC settings, navigate through to network and workplace, enter in my corporate email address and click join. And so now, because my corporation uses Windows Azure Active Authentication, after I provide my credentials here, it’s going to ask me to provide a second form of authentication of my identity.

BRAD ANDERSON: That would be great if we could actually do two factors. So you’re registering the device with the service. It would be great if there would be a way to automatically have you verify that this is you and this is your device.

MOLLY BROWN: Exactly. And so I can simply just use this phone factor to have it give me a quick call, so that I can identify. Here we go. Here comes the call. Answer and  

VOICE: (Thank you for using Microsoft’s sign in verification system. Press the pound key to finish signing in.)

BRAD ANDERSON: She’s actually using a Windows Phone back here.

VOICE: (You have been signed in. Goodbye.)

MOLLY BROWN: So as simple as that, a couple of touches on my phone, I’m now joined to my workplace. So now let’s go back and take a look at that SharePoint site. (Applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON: That’s actually a really big deal. As I’ve talked with a number of organizations around the world, one of the challenges that they have is how do you actually get the users to register and let the service know about their devices, look at how integrated, how simple that was, with the kind of verification and security you would want.

MOLLY BROWN: So here I’ve reentered my credentials now that my device is registered and look, I’ve got access to my team SharePoint site and I’m ready to go. (Applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON: That’s great.

MOLLY BROWN: So this is great, but I’d also like access to the set of apps and services that my IT department provides for me. So to get that level of support I just need to do one extra step, which is enroll my device for management. And again, I simply go back to the PC settings and to that workplace area and now I turn on management. This is going to configure my device with the Windows Intune Cloud Management service. And it will allow IT to push down policies and applications and other resources that I need to be able to work from here.

BRAD ANDERSON: So we registered the device with Azure Active Directory. Now we’re registering the device with Intune and making it manageable, you will, to the Intune service.

MOLLY BROWN: It seems to be a little slow here talking to our  

BRAD ANDERSON: Everyone here is using their wired right now.

MOLLY BROWN: So actually this will then just prompt me to enter my credentials one more time and that initiates the enrollment process. The full process takes a few minutes to get fully complete. So I think I’ll let you believe that I can enter my password correctly, again. And we’ll move onto my second device here, that we  

BRAD ANDERSON: It’s a Julia Childs moment.

MOLLY BROWN: Yes, it’s a Julia Childs moment, exactly. So we have this second device here that’s already gone  has already moved over. Has already both joined the workplace and been enrolled for management. And so when I  and from here I can see that I look at first the network settings, IT has been able to push down both my VPN settings and then the certificates I need to get on the corporate Wi-Fi.

BRAD ANDERSON: And this is mobile device management coming from the cloud. So cloud optimized mobile device management, all integrated with configuration manager.

MOLLY BROWN: Exactly. So through this I can work easily from this machine, whether I’m in the office or outside the office. In addition to that I would like access to the set of apps that I need to get my job done. So I go through the company portal here and I see the catalogue of applications that my IT department has published for me. I see here both line-of-business apps and links to applications and third-party application stores, and public application stores. I also see my list of all of my devices that have been registered for management and I can do simple tasks like remote wipe, or un-enroll the devices from management. And then I get that all-important contact information for when I’m in a jam and I need some help. I can swipe up here from the bottom and access my user data through work folders.

BRAD ANDERSON: Let me talk a little bit about work folders. This one of the new capabilities of Windows Server 2012 R2. And think about this as the solution that allows you to enable your users to have access to all their files across all their devices. So with work folders I can literally save to my device and automatically replicate all my files up into the file servers in your data center and then back out to your other devices. So through this experience that Molly is showing you I can get access to all my apps, all my data, to be productive.

MOLLY BROWN: Exactly. So let’s go take a look at  and then of course when that data is stored on this device it’s actually encrypted, so that it’s secure in case the device was lost. And if I un-enroll the device from management I lose access to the data on this device. So the data remains secured even when it’s on this personal device.

Let’s walk through the application installation experience. So I’m going to install the line-of-business  my company’s expense reporting tool. I just simply click install and that triggers the application download and install as a background process. When it’s now complete I get notification of that. So let’s go take a look at the start screen and go look at my all apps and I find my expense reports app. I can pin it there to the Start menu, or Start screen, and we’re all set and I’m ready to go. So as you can see, in a very few steps I’m able to enroll, join my device to the workplace to get access to resources, enroll my device from management to get the other set of apps and configuration I need to remain productive from this device. And I’m all ready to go.

So now if we think a few months, a year down the road, I want to pass this device off to my kids and I’m not going to use it for work anymore. I need an easy way to remove all this work stuff from the device. So to do that I just simply go back through PC settings to the workplace area and I can leave my workplace, just a couple of taps here and I can turn off management, again, with just a couple of taps. And so then I go back and my app is gone, but my family photos are still there, along with my personal apps and ready to go. (Applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON: How many of you have ever had the experience where for some reason IT wipes your device and it wipes everything, right, corporate data, personal data, how many of you have had that happen? So this is now a selective wipe, either initiated by the user or by IT that only removes your corporate data, your corporate assets, but leaves your personal things in place.

MOLLY BROWN: Thanks, Brad.

BRAD ANDERSON: Thanks, Molly. Thank you so much. All right. So while we did that demonstration on a Windows device, that company portal is an app that came through the app store, that same application can be downloaded through the iOS store, through the Apple store, and through the Android store. So you’re actually going to have this consistent experience where you as IT can brand yourself to your users. They have that consistent experience across their PCs, their Windows devices, their iOS devices, their Android devices, and it actually has some intelligence built into that. So it understands first who the user is, the device they’re working on, and then it actually understands the network location. Are they on a corporate network or are they not on a corporate network. And it enables them to set policies on all three of those. That is truly enabling what we call people-centric IT and enables you to make your users productive on all their devices.

So let me just kind of summarize here then for a minute. We just walked you through the capabilities that we have, that we’ve been building in these R2 releases and Intune that enable you to empower your users, enables you to give them that consistent experience across all their devices. You can unify your environment, so PC management, device management, all your anti-malware, all these things can now be done through one common infrastructure that’s now been cloud optimized with Windows Intune and then protecting the corporate assets and protecting your data, things like selective wipe, like we just described, also the ability to actually express policy on the actual files themselves using things like IRM in order to secure the data. That’s what we’re delivering. We know many of you in the audience here, and watching this, are the desktop administrators and you’re dealing with how do you enable users across all their devices. We have a solution for you and we think that we have a very, very powerful way to help you do that. OK.

All right. So now we just covered devices, how we enable users across all of those devices, and enable things like the BYO trends. Let’s now transition to talk about the apps. These devices and users all want rich, great applications. Now, if you ask the developers what they want, developers will tell you things like, wow, for us it’s all about time to market. We want to be effective, and efficient, we want to develop as rapidly as we can. We want to take advantage of the latest capabilities, the latest technologies, in order to make us more efficient. And finally, we want to make sure that the organization is ready for it. And so we’re trying to understand more, we’re trying to implement more around dev ops, but is the organization really ready for that?

So as we build this latest set of capabilities in Windows Azure, as well as in Visual Studio, these are the things that we’ve had in mind and have been just core precepts and concepts as we’ve built it. First and foremost is about a rapid lifecycle, so build, operate, learn; build, operate, learn. And enabling that kind of a cadence as you’re developing these applications, whether it be for internal user or for your customers, the ability to build that application and have it accessible across all the devices users want to work on, and finally making sure that it’s secure and that it is highly available, and available to your users 24/7 anywhere in the world.

And so with that in mind, let’s actually talk a little bit about some of the things that we’ve been doing in Windows Azure. As you think about your public cloud partner, and who you’re going to identify and really kind of bet on as that strategic partner, there’s a couple of things that I would encourage you to keep in mind.

One, you’re looking for a partner that’s investing at the level required to give you reach around the world. And when you build out these public cloud infrastructures, your investment in cap-ex is literally measured in the billions. Literally, as we build out Azure, we are deploying hundreds of thousands of servers a year. It’s a significant investment. You’re looking for a partner that has a guaranteed SLA, and will guarantee that you have that availability. And, finally, you want a partner that gives you that flexibility that you might be running in the cloud today, in the public cloud, but if you want to bring that back into your data center, you have that flexibility and you’re not locked in.

So let me give you some of the specifics about Azure. First of all, these are where we have global data center at. We just announced last week significant investments in the Asia area. Microsoft is now the first multinational organization that through a partnership has  will be bringing online this week capacity in our public cloud in Mainland China. So why is that important? That gives you reach now into China, both for your employees, as well as for the business opportunity that China itself presents.

You want an organization that has the ability to have global support in your language around the world. These are the locations where we have global support, where we are supporting, you see there at the bottom, over a billion customers, over 20 million organizations around the world. You also want to talk and interact with the local account teams. And then, finally, you want your billing to be done in the local currency. This is the infrastructure and the capabilities that we have been building out inside of Windows Azure. And it has been absolutely one of the most fun and one of the most rewarding things that we’ve ever done, because it’s just such a great opportunity to latch on and innovate, and then we bring that innovation to you, which we’re going to talk about a little bit later to talk about Windows Server.

One of the things we thought it would be interesting here is to actually have you hear from a customer about how they’re using Windows Azure, and so with that we’re going to invite from Easy Jet the enterprise architect Bert Craven on stage to give us a little discussion about how they’re using it. Give him a hand.

(Applause.)

BERT CRAVEN: Hey, Brad.

BRAD ANDERSON: Hey, Bert. Thanks for being here.

BERT CRAVEN: It’s great to be here.

BRAD ANDERSON: So Bert, tell us a little bit about Easy Jet.

BERT CRAVEN: So Easy Jet are the largest airline in the U.K. We are the fourth largest airline in Europe, and we’re in the top 10 in the world in terms of passenger numbers. So by numbers that means 60 million passengers a year. We have 210 aircraft. We fly our passengers to over 130 destinations in 32 different countries.

BRAD ANDERSON: So what was the problem that you were struggling with that kind of led you to look at Azure?

BERT CRAVEN: So Easy Jet is turning 18 this year, and for the first 17 years of our lives we sold tickets, and our passengers would turn the ticket into a seat by running as fast as they could towards the aircraft at boarding time.

BRAD ANDERSON: Kind of like Southwestern.

BERT CRAVEN: It’s a full contact sport, and it’s not very popular with our passengers. So we decided that we would move to an allocated seating model, which is a real DNA change for our organization. Our reservation system doesn’t understand how to do that. So we had to add that functionality. So as well as tracking the 60 million passengers, now we’ve got to track the 70 million seats that we fly to understand which seats have been sold and which ones haven’t and all that kind of stuff.

BRAD ANDERSON: How did Azure then help you with that?

BERT CRAVEN: So we decided that this workload was better done on Azure than in our reservation system. And so what we did was we created a seating solution out on Azure, and then we blend the reservation experience and the seating experience together in the browser for the user. I can show you how it works.

BRAD ANDERSON: Yes, let’s look at it.

BERT CRAVEN: I’m teed up here on EasyJet.com. This is an on-premise website. It has our reservation system behind it. I’m all ready to fly next week with two adults, a child, and an infant from London to Madrid. It’s going to warn me about flying with an infant.

BRAD ANDERSON: It sounds dangerous.

BERT CRAVEN: It is. So I can select my flights, and they will be put in my basket here over on the right-hand side. So I know I have two flights. When I click on continue, it’s going to offer me a whole set of additional options that I can add. And all of those options come from EasyJet.com except for this top panel up here.

Now when I clicked on continue just then, the page loaded and then made an AJAX request out to Azure, and Azure understands that this is a seated flight. It understands what seats are remaining. It knows what price bands those seats are in. And any interaction I now do with this top panel here will be done with Azure. So Azure will now draw in a map of the aircraft. It knows all of the seating rules. So it knows that my adult here with an infant can’t sit in an exit row. So I’m going to select seats for my three passengers. Move on to my next flight, three more seats.

And then when I click here, Azure is going to fire events down into the parent page. The basket here is listening for those events, and all that my reservation system needs to understand is the output of the conversation I just had with Azure.

BRAD ANDERSON: So what I love about this is just how integrated it is. In this Web page, you’re bringing capacity from your data centers, from Azure, but to the user it’s all seamless.

BERT CRAVEN: Absolutely.

BRAD ANDERSON: Now I hear you guys had gotten like a spike in utilization and need in January. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

BERT CRAVEN: Yes. So 60 million of anything is a scale problem. We make things worse by in the second week of January we put most of our summer inventory on sale at slash-down prices. And our website then has to deal with around 20,000 concurrent users filling ten claims a minute for about a week. And that’s a real struggle.

BRAD ANDERSON: That sounds like a stampede.

BERT CRAVEN: It is, it’s tough.

BRAD ANDERSON: How do you deal with that?

BERT CRAVEN: So 10 claims a minute on Azure kind of looks like this. This is my seating management portal on Azure, and as we move into our January sale I can have somebody log on here. They can dial up full fire hose mode, click save, and we’re running 10 claims a minute within minutes.

BRAD ANDERSON: It just scales up just like that.

BERT CRAVEN: Absolutely. This is incredibly powerful for my business, for the way that we deliver our IT, and ultimately how we deliver customer value.

BRAD ANDERSON: Great. That’s just wonderful, Bert. Thanks for coming.

BERT CRAVEN: Thank you.

BRAD ANDERSON: Let’s give him a hand everybody.

(Applause.)

And more and more often we’re seeing that as just one of the core scenarios that we see in Azure, where there’s a set of assets and capabilities that you have in your data centers, they need to be optimized, they need to be modernized, and you just need the scale that Bert talked about here. And that’s one of the great things that Azure provides. So thank you, Bert, for doing that for us.

OK. Let’s now dive in deeper in some of the things that we’re doing in Azure as well as some of the things we’re doing in Visual Studio. And let’s invite Scott Guthrie to the stage. Let’s give him a hand.

(Applause.)

Hey, Scott, how are you doing?

SCOTT GUTHRIE: Thanks, Brad.

So we’ve talked about how Windows Azure provides a great platform for running apps in the cloud. And one of the things we’re doing this week is also making it a fantastic environment for dev tests, including for teams that want to be able to develop their apps in the cloud but still deploy them in an on-premises environment.

So what makes the cloud great for dev test? In a word it’s agility. As a developer I can use the cloud to easily create resources when I need them, tear them down when I don’t need them, and be able to do that in minutes without ever having to ask anyone to do something for me.

For example, the developer with Windows Azure, I could use Windows Azure to create a new virtual machine. If I need more resources I could add a second virtual machine and connect them with a virtual network, perhaps even add a database. And the beauty is I can do all of this myself in a matter of minutes. I can install any software I want within these virtual machines. So I can install SharePoint, or SQL, or BizTalk, and basically configure them and use them however I need for my dev test environment.

And the great thing is at night or on the weekends, if I’m not using these virtual machines, I can just go ahead and send a command to shut them down. Because with Windows Azure you only pay for what you use, this enables you to save a lot of money over what you otherwise would send in a traditional on-premise dev test environment.

And because the virtual machine that we use inside Windows Azure use the exact same version of Windows Server that runs on-premises, when I’m ready to deploy my application, I can choose to deploy the app in the cloud, or I can just go ahead and actually deploy it to my on-premises data center environment. The great thing about this is it allows me to go ahead and take advantage of the cloud for dev test even if I’m not actually deploying my production app ultimately in it.

So this core work I kind of walked through is available and has been available for a little while within Windows Azure. What we’re doing this week is making a set of announcements and releases that makes it even better.

The first one here is that we no longer charge for stopped VMs running inside Windows Azure. (Cheers and applause.) Prior to today, if you stopped a VM, we still kept it deployed in the deployment slot on the compute cluster, and still charged you for an hourly rate unless you actually explicitly deleted it. Now starting today when you stop a VM it stops and you no longer get billed. But, you can still go ahead and recreate it and start on it in order to boot it back up and run it again.

We’re also today moving to a new per-minute billing model with Windows Azure. Previously with Windows Azure, if you spun up a VM and ran it for, say, 36 minutes in an hour, and then shut it down, you’d still be billed for the entire hour. Starting today we now prorate the number of minutes that you use the VM for. And so if you spin it up for 36 minutes and shut it down you only pay for the 36-minute equivalent of that rate. And both this, as well as stop a VM charging improvement enables you to save a tremendous is amount of money and it’s ideal for an elastic dev-test workload. We’re also today enabling you to use your MSDN server licenses on Windows Azure at no charge. (Applause.)

You can install them within any virtual machine on Windows Azure, or you can actually just go ahead and deploy pre-created virtual machine images that we have within the Windows Azure management portal. And to make it even better, we’re also today announcing a new special rate for MSDN subscribers that you can now use to run any number of virtual machines within Windows Azure, using all of our server products for dev test scenarios. This allows you to run Windows Server, SQL Enterprise, and BizTalk enterprise, at up to a 97 percent discount off of the standard rate. You can spin up any number of virtual machines you want within Windows Azure and run at these rates. And this translates into an enormous cost savings for dev test, and it’s really unmatched by anyone else in the market.

We’re also today excited to announce a new MSDN subscription offer that provides up to $150 a month of free Windows Azure credits. You can use these credits on any Windows Azure resource for dev test and the great thing is they’re per-subscriber. So each member of your dev team can now actually have their own dev test environment within Windows Azure. And you get these credits every month to spend on it.

So for example, if you’re an MSDN premium customer, you get $100 of credits a month. You could use these with a discounted rate, and all the other features I just mentioned, to spin up three virtual machines and run them for 16 hours each day of a 31 day month, and still have a little bit left over, or you can spin up 80 virtual machines for 20 hours to do a load test run, or you could spin up 50 HD Insight Hadoop notes to do map reduce jobs for 10 hours, or you can run up to 100 websites against the SQL database. Again, all these scenarios you can do, plus a lot more. The great thing about the credits is they basically allow you to use any Windows Azure resource in whatever combination you want for dev test purposes. And again, it’s available to all MSDN subscribers, and so every member of your team gets these sets of credits and can start using the cloud immediately for dev test.

To make it even easier for you to track how much of these credits you’ve used, we’ve also today updated the Windows Azure management portal so that you can now go ahead and just click at the top and see precisely how much of the hours and credits that you’ve taken advantage of as part of your MSDN subscription, how much is remaining. If you click the details you can even see a burn down chart, see exactly how much of the free credit you’ve used, and when you use them, and based on your current usage when they’re going to expire in the future.

The great thing is every month you get new credits, so you can use this as a way, again, for each developer in your team to have their own dev test environment, be able to keep track of them, and be able to really use the cloud to get a tremendous amount more agility and more productivity out of it. And what’s great is, because I can actually use the cloud to both dev test and then deploy on the Windows Azure, I can also use the cloud to dev test and deploy my on-premises environment. So it’s really an offer that any MSDN customer and any developer, developing frankly on any platform, can take advantage of and see tremendous agility and savings from.

So everyone here who is watching online or in the audience can actually go to the WindowsAzure.com website today in order to sign up for Windows Azure, or activate their new MSDN benefits offer and start taking advantage of all these capabilities that I mentioned. And Brad had a cool trick this morning where he rode in on an Aston Martin car. I thought actually I might try to one-up him here, by actually giving one away. And one of the things we’re excited to announce is for anyone that actually goes to WindowsAzure.com, who is an MSDN subscriber, and who actually signs up and activates their MSDN benefits on Windows Azure, and builds an app before the end of September, will actually be enrolled in a special sweepstakes offer that we’re going to do and one lucky person will get a chance to drive away with their own Aston Martin car. (Applause.)

And hopefully for the people that don’t win, they still find that the actual Windows Azure account and MSDN benefits are still sort of priceless and something to actually take advantage of. And so we’re looking forward to seeing what you do with them. We hope it really enables you to have a tremendous amount more agility and be able to take advantage of it for both cloud, as well as on-premises-based deployments.

So thank you very much. I’d like to invite Brian Harry on stage now to talk about some of the great things, as well, that we’re doing in the developer space.

BRIAN HARRY: Thank you, Scott. I appreciate it.

All right. So it’s kind of a presenter’s nightmare to walk up right after the announcement of a brand new free sports car. But, we’ll do our best. All right. So thanks for the opportunity to talk to you about Visual Studio. Last fall we shipped Visual Studio 2012. That’s been the most successful release of Visual Studio to date, with over 4 million downloads already. At the same time we introduced our Visual Studio continuous updates program. And since then we’ve shipped two major updates, and are about to ship our third. They also have been incredibly popular. In fact, update two, within one month of the release of update two, over 50 percent of Visual Studio 2012 users had already updated.

So sort of in that vein of continuous updates let me talk to you about the next major version of Visual Studio. So we’re going to ship Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013 later this year. And we will ship a preview on June 26th, along with the BUILD conference. So please look for that and download it and give us your feedback. I’m going to spend a little time talking to you about what’s in our releases that are coming this year. So we think kind of the biggest problem with software development today is iteration. How do we help developers figure out how to get from idea to implementation, to into customer’s hands, back to feedback and to next idea and iterate that rapidly? We made a bunch of progress on that in Visual Studio 2012 and we’re continuing in that vein for Visual Studio 2013.

So let’s take a look at some of the new features that we have. So let’s start with project management. If you use Visual Studio 2012 then you’re familiar with our new agile project management capabilities that allow a team to take  to have a backlog, to prioritize it, to break that backlog down into iterations, or sprints, and then to manage the work in those sprints on a day-to-day basis with the task board. In 2013 we’re taking that to the next step and trying to figure out how to help organizations managing larger projects made up of many small teams sort of manage that work as a whole. So we’ve added hierarchical backlogs that enable you to have an overall backlog for your organization.

So here I’ve got a backlog of features for my organization. I can then drill into that backlog and see the specific user stories that play against those features. And you’ll see that each of those are assigned to the appropriate feature teams. I can even drill down and see the individual tasks, if I want to. This allows me to roll up all of my work against some higher-level concept of progress, or value for my organization.

All right. Let’s also talk about collaboration. Another important value that we’ve always viewed in Team Foundation Server is the notion of development team collaboration and making that first class. So we’ve got a new feature coming in Team Foundation Server 2013 that we call Team Room. And it is sort of a durable record of everything that’s happening in your team. So you can see here check-ins that have happened, code reviews, work items that have been changed. And it’s a general space where the team can collaborate. It’s a message area where we can have active conversation.

So imagine I was out sick yesterday and I came in this morning and I kind of want to catch up on what happened. So I can come to the Team Room. I can simply go back to the record for yesterday, find out what happened, and all of these are active links that I can drill into and learn more about. So it enables the whole team to kind of stay on the same page.

We can’t have a conversation about Visual Studio without talking about code. So let’s talk about what we’re doing for the developer who is writing code all day. One of the biggest problems that a developer has is context. I’m busy focused on my code, but there’s a lot of stuff outside of the code that I’m looking at, information that will help me understand that code, particularly if it’s code I’m not particularly familiar with.

We’re adding a new feature in Visual Studio 2013 that I call a heads-up display, it overlays onto your code like a heads-up display does information that’s useful to you. So if you look here at this “method create,” there’s a line right above it that is the heads-up display with a set of indictors. And one of them, for example, is references that shows me all the places that this code is referenced. And I can hover and see the context in the calling method.

We also have a test indicator that as you’re coding Visual Studio is running tests in the background. And if at any point one of those tests starts failing, the indicator will immediately light up and let you know. So here you can see I’ve got two tests, one of them failing and one of them passing. You can either fix the method immediately, I can drill into the test itself and debug the test.

We’ve also got a change indicator. Maybe you’re looking at this method and something doesn’t look right, it looks different, or you’re not sure who to talk to about it. You can quickly see that Brian Keller was the last person to change this code, and see all the lists of recent changes, drill into those and see for this method these are the recent changes.

So a really easy and convenient way to project into your source code a bunch of contextual information.

All right. So let’s imagine that I’ve fixed all my bugs, and I’m kind of happy with this and I think I’m ready to ship it. But before I do, I would like to make sure that it’s going to work in production. I want to make sure it scales. I want to make sure it performs. I want to make sure it’s reliable.

Before I do, I would like to run a load test just to make sure. This is a pretty big app. It’s about 10,000 users that use this app. It’s a little daunting because setting up the infrastructure to run a 10,000-user load test can be a pain. It’s a lot of machines I’ve got to set up. And particularly for something I don’t do all that often, it’s just not worth it. This is a perfect scenario for the cloud.

So we’re introducing as part of Visual Studio 2013 a new cloud load test service that enables you to load test your application from the cloud. You just write your load test the same way you always have since Visual Studio 2005 when we introduced load testing. I create my load test. The difference is in my load test settings I now have the ability to run the test using Visual Studio Team Foundation Service. So I simply take my load test and click run, and that will automatically upload my test to the cloud and begin the load test.

Load tests take a few minutes, so I’m going to switch to one I ran a little bit ago. And here we can see as the load test runs it will show you progress. And I can see here that as my load scaled up, it looks like my response time stayed pretty good. So I’m feeling good about this app. I feel like I’m ready to release it into production.

Which brings me to the next problem that developers face, which is the process of getting code into production. We’ve figured out how to enable our development teams to be agile and iterate rapidly, but we always run into this roadblock of delivering into production. So I’m announcing today that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire a product called InRelease from InCycle Systems. InRelease is a release management product built specifically for Team Foundation Server that helps you manage scalable release processes from very simple to very formal.

So here I’m looking at a release for an application where I’ve defined a moderately formal release process that includes dev, QA, and production stages, each of those stages has a set of release criteria, an owner, someone who has to approve the change, and then I can define a common flow for those things and a set of configuration variables like database connections, et cetera, for each environment.

Then as a release manager I can go to the release management portal, see the sets of releases and where they are in their life, and I see here that I’ve got a release that is done with QA and ready for me to approve to go to production.

I can simply click approve, say it’s good, and that will automatically trigger the transition of that release from QA to production, which fires off some notifications to our operations teams, triggers some additional automation, and it helps me provide a repeatable, reliable way of driving new software into production.

So as you can see, we continue to drive forward on the breadth of the application lifecycle, including helping with planning, development, testing, and release.

So please, if you want to learn more, come see my Foundation session, which is immediately after the keynote, where I’ll spend a bunch more time drilling into these. And please check out the preview later this month.

So thank you very much, and I appreciate it. (Applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON: Thanks, Brian.

BRIAN HARRY: Thank you, Brad.

BRAD ANDERSON: Yeah, I’ve got to say that’s actually one of the coolest demos I’ve seen of Visual Studio and some of the things that we’re doing in terms of innovating around collaboration and making developers more efficient and more effective. I just absolutely love it.

OK, started with devices. Talked about enabling users on those devices. Creating the applications now for the devices and users to consume.

We’re going to talk a little bit about data. OK, and let’s talk a little bit about the amount of data and the trends that are happening around that.

First of all, data growth. Right now, IDC is telling us that there’s a 60-percent CAGR in growth and the amount of data that’s being generated around the world.

What that means is in a short five years, we’ll have ten times the amount of data that we have right now. Unbelievable growth in terms of data.

Second, 85 percent of that data that’s being generated is comings from new devices. So sensors and RFIDs and logs.

Third, you know, the business users, their expectations are just increasing. And they’re asking us to deliver the data in ways the users of all levels from the CXO down to a program manager or product manager can take a look at that data and try to gain the insights out of it.

I think Gartner said it best when they said, listen, the organizations that actually build out a modern information management system in 2015 will be 20 percent more profitable, financially better than its competitors.

So as we thought about what we wanted to do in terms of data and enabling you to gain the insights out of that data to advance your business, to better serve your customers, we really focused on these areas. And we focused on how do we make that easy access to all the data across the board? Powerful analytics for all, and finally, delivering what we call a complete data platform.

So let’s actually take a look at what that all means. And to do that, Quentin from the data platform is going to come walk us through what our strategy and vision is here. Let’s give him a hand. (Applause.)

QUENTIN CLARK: Hi.

BRAD ANDERSON: Thanks, Quentin.

QUENTIN CLARK: Thanks, Brad.

Good morning. I’m really excited to be here at TechEd North America this year talking about the change that’s coming in how information is going to affect every business.

There’s a renaissance happening in the role of information and the able to embrace new kinds of data for every business.

To make that a little more personal, let me start with just a little vignette, give people an idea.

Imagine you walk into a large retailer. It could be auto parts, could be home supplies, home improvement, that kind of thing.

And because you’re enrolled in their membership and loyalty program, you have an app installed on your, hopefully, Windows Phone. You walk in, through geo-fencing, the application lights up. And the application in the retail store guides you through your experience in the store.

And even as you get to things like getting to a particular aisle, looking for a particular kind of product, you’re being fed information on the screens that are up in the aisle that are helping you, guiding you through that whole experience. Including brand-specific things or incentives, that kind of stuff.

And then as you get to the checkout aisle, of course, you know, all the loyalty programs that you’re in and the retail membership and all of that all just sort of magically transact correctly at the checkout counter.

What’s behind that, behind the scenes, is data. All right? There is a huge change in what kinds of information and what’s being done with the information to achieve those kinds of scenarios.

Part of it is big data. Certainly, the notion of having GPS telemetry of every consumer experience in every store on the planet, there’s a lot of data there. And we have to be able to process that data.

But it’s not just the different data types, it’s also the different data sources. So it’s not just the traditional line-of-business data that we’re talking about, it’s new data signals that come from within the enterprise, but also come from a broad variety of different sources. Different partners, different industries, different analytics, different kinds of companies.

We even find situations where competitors are collaborating on certain kinds of data.

And then there are the aspects of visualizing all that information and creating the stories for the insights, understanding, ultimately, what that information really means.

So there’s this variety of information, the visualizations and putting that to analytics, all of that has to be done in a way where the expectation now is that things are happening much more real time.

And as an industry, we’re embracing things like in-memory as a way to achieve a much more rapid cadence of how business and information come together.

All this put together means that data changes everything. Industry by industry, customer by customer, I’m having conversations where I’m finding out that the companies that are embracing the new kinds of information, the new sort of signals that are out there in the world, it’s fundamentally changing their business.

At Microsoft, we’re building a complete data platform that catalyzes that change. Democratizes it. You start by finding information. That information could be starting with the traditional line-of-business data, embracing new data signals that your own business is generating, but then reaching out into the world and finding other information sets that are valuable. Putting those together in new ways, combining the data into different ways of looking at how your business is affected.

Creating theories. Forming theories about how the business interacts, how a signal from the weather can affect fuel pricing, or how a signal from a package shipping company can affect the viability of a small loan.

Creating those theories and analyzing the data in that way. And even that source can often restart the cycle where you now reach for more information because you have another idea, another theory on what the effect and interaction is.

You go from that step. The “ah-hah” moments are fantastic. They need to be operationalized. And they need to be operationalized at tremendous scale. It’s not enough just to have that moment, but you have to be able to have machinery, have that moment and operationalize that on a continuous basis. This whole cycle is how we get from data to insight.

And it has to be done in a way that’s easy, powerful, and complete. Easy, of course, starts with the tools. But embracing the next generation of Excel, how we’re baking BI and the power of BI and analytics deeply into Excel, we’re giving people a tool they already know. This isn’t some separate tool, some separate product you have to go learn. We’re making it easy for people to obtain that data.

By creating features in Excel like our code name Data Explorer, we’re allowing people to go to the marketplace, not just finding their own data, but going out into the world and finding other information sets that can help them understand their business.

Easy also means in deployment and scale. Whether it’s the on-prem SQL Server product or the work we do in Azure with the blob store and with Azure database, the deployment and scale and the turnkey nature of being able to build large-scale applications, data management, and analytics.

The power has to be there. The power in the visualizations, there’s a power in those stories. The power in the analytics, and the power in the underlying systems. And this is where the real-time nature, things like our StreamInsight, our continuous processing work, are key aspects of how we’re enabling this next generation of insight.

And complete. It has to be the entire ecosystem of the platform. It’s not enough to have a good visualization tool. It’s not enough to have a powerful database. It’s not enough to have the kind of ability to find data and have a marketplace for information. It turns out, it takes this entire cycle and takes the entire, complete platform.

As a key component of that, I’m very happy to be introducing today Microsoft SQL Server 2014. SQL Server 2014 moves the bar forward on all these dimensions. We’re making it easier to create availability, we’re making it easier to take advantage of Azure with the hybrid scenarios of backup. We’re making it more powerful on the work we’ve already starting with in-memory, and we’re making it complete by rounding out that in-memory work to transaction processing in memory.

Our in-memory journey with SQL Server 2014 began actually with Excel. Where we, with our PowerPivot and Power View work, we empowered users to manipulate millions of records in real-time interactivity. We took that compressed work and we brought it back into Analysis Server where you could operationalize the work that’s being done by knowledge workers in that self-service BI meme.

And we further brought it back into the database, in the RDBMS for the columnar index capabilities in memory in SQL Server 2012.

The latest release of Parallel Data Warehouse 2.0 that shipped just a couple months ago has moved that forward. Better performance, compression capability, and more. And we’re bringing that all into SQL Server 2014.

But, importantly, we’re also bringing transaction processing into the in-memory modern world. We’re building our transaction processing work directly into the database. It’s not a separate product. It’s not a separate thing to program to. We’re baking it right in.

And we were doing it because it is a way to achieve unprecedented latency and scale, low latency and high scale and throughput for transactional data.

We have an early adopter of this technology, Edgenet. They build a retail SaaS solution for inventory management. And if you’ve ever had the experience you walk into a store and you ask, “Do you have this particular product?” And they say, “Yeah, we have this product, we think, but we need to go to the shelves and find out.”

As a database guy, I always found this a little bit puzzling. But what turns out, is that when you look at some of these larger retail situations, being able to do real-time inventory management is a challenge with a lot of products moving on a day-to-day basis.

Edgenet, by embracing SQL Server 2014’s transactional processing in-memory technology, has moved that cadence from once-a-day batch updating of the inventory out of the line-of-business system to near real time. So you walk in the store and you ask if there’s a product that’s in inventory, they have the answer for you, and the answer is accurate. It’s transformed their business.

Of course this solid platform upon which the data is built in the first place is one piece of this. But that overall “data changes everything” arc means you have to have the right analytics. You have to have the right ability to understand the data that you’re working with.

To talk about this more, I’d like to invite Eron Kelly up. They can’t see you, there we go. (Applause.)

ERON KELLY: Thanks, Quentin.

QUENTIN CLARK: Eron Kelly is my marketing partner. And, literally, every day or at least once a week or so, we work at a board just like this one.

So I have a PPI, little smaller, I have the 60-inch, not the 80-something-inch board in my office. These are Windows 8 touchscreen machines. And the ability to stand instead of sit at a conference table with printouts, but to stand at a device like this and interact with our BI data has really transformed our business.

And we have an interesting data set that I think Eron has prepared for us.

ERON KELLY: That’s right, Quentin. And, thanks, it’s great to be here at TechEd. What I have here today is data on everyone in this room. Let’s go unlock some insights using my favorite tool, Excel.

And what you see here is the registration data from TechEd. And it’s helpful. I can sort of see cities and states and some things, but it’s kind of hard to get a lot of insights out of it in this format.

So I’m going to go ahead and launch one of my favorite new tools, new features of Excel called Project GeoFlow. And this is a code name of a new very powerful mapping tool that we’ve made part of Excel and it’s in preview right now as a great new add-in.

QUENTIN CLARK: So what he’s doing right now is he’s selecting, and notice he didn’t go to some mapping function or have to dig into some code or column selection in some other tool. Built right in as part of Excel. GeoFlow looked at what he was looking at, and immediately brought out the columns, the data sets that it thought might be relevant.

ERON KELLY: Exactly. So we can see where people are from. So here are some folks from TechEd from the United States and the different cities. We’ve got a lot of people from Europe, it’s great to see this number of people here from Europe. We’ve even got some folks from Africa. Where are the folks from Africa out there? Little claps, OK, we’ve got a few out there. There we go.

QUENTIN CLARK: There we go.

ERON KELLY: There we go. There’s a few folks from South America. And so this is kind of helpful. And it allows me, versus the columns and rows, it allows me to kind of see where people are from.

But I need more insight. We need to get more data out of this, more insight. So what do you think? What city contributed the most attendees to TechEd from North America?

QUENTIN CLARK: From North America? Probably New York, Chicago, somewhere in Texas, San Francisco.

ERON KELLY: Let’s take a look.

QUENTIN CLARK: Redmond. Of course it’s Redmond. There are so many Microsofties here. (Laughter.) We love coming out in force.

ERON KELLY: We love coming to TechEd and talking to our customers about a great new technology. OK, so you did OK on that first test. Now let’s go to Europe. Let’s go to Europe. Now, what do you think? What city and what country do you think represents the greatest number of attendees here at TechEd North America?

QUENTIN CLARK: Well, it’s got to be London, U.K., right?

ERON KELLY: Think so?

QUENTIN CLARK: I think so.

ERON KELLY: All right, let’s take a look.

QUENTIN CLARK: Stockholm, it’s Sweden! Where are the Swedes out here? (Applause.) There we go, there’s a few of them over there. They cluster.

ERON KELLY: Sweden actually has the most folks from Europe here at TechEd North America, very excited to have the Swedes in the house. Very, very excited.

Now, what’s kind of cool is I can see big trends in the data with GeoFlow, much better than those columns and rows. But what I also want to be able to do is dive in. So let me zoom in here and take a look at one of my favorite cities in North America, Miami. OK? So I can zoom in and this is one of the things that’s really great about GeoFlow. I can zoom in, and let’s take a look at the data.

Now, what I want to do is find out more about who’s here from Miami. So let me go ahead and add the titles of all the folks that are here in Miami. Look at that, now, let me pull back a little bit.

QUENTIN CLARK: It’s very tall.

ERON KELLY: Very tall. So here are the titles of the folks here from Miami. So let’s take a look. Who do we got here? We’ve got an application analyst, we’ve got an associate director, pretty common, business technology consultant. Whoa, are you kidding me? The chief geek?

QUENTIN CLARK: Chief geek. (Laughter.)

ERON KELLY: There is a chief geek from Miami. I can’t make this up, I’m not that good. And so what I’ve got here is I’ve got the official geek bag and the geek hat, you, sir, are the chief geek of TechEd 2013, come to the booth, bring your badge with the chief geek tag on it, and you will get this bag and hat. That’s awesome stuff. (Applause.) Awesome stuff.

Now, Quentin, what’s so cool about this is with GeoFlow, I was able to see the big trends in the data, but I was also able to drill down into a very specific data point. And I was able to take a huge event like TechEd and personalize it for one person. Someone had a very special keynote experience just now.

UENTIN CLARK: A chief geek.

ERON KELLY: That’s right. The chief geek of TechEd.

So let’s keep going. What I’ve also got here is a typical Power View workbook.

QUENTIN CLARK: Standard Power View as part of Excel 2013.

ERON KELLY: Standard Power View. And what I’ve done is I’ve brought in session data. So people pre-register for sessions at TechEd. And I wanted to take a look at the data because I want to know who’s gonna be in various sessions. You know, it helps you tune your anecdotes or pick which case studies to cover.

So I take this first session, here’s the foundational session, big data, small data, all data that we’re going to do here in a few minutes.

I want to see who’s coming to a session. Well, all I have to do is press the bar and I can see some of the trends. So telecommunications and consumer products are going to be a higher disposition in his event.

I can see the Swedes are out in force there for big data and small data, it’s great to see them. And some folks from the U.K. as well.

This is actually in contrast to where I click here on the SQL Server Future session. We see insurance kind of pop, which makes sense if you think about the real-time transaction processing you’re talking about, having some of that extra oomph in some of their insurance applications makes a lot of sense.

You know, and this is so easy to use, even a VP can do it.

QUENTIN CLARK: Thanks, appreciate that.

ERON KELLY: Yeah. Yeah. (Laughter.)

And so you may be asking yourself, OK, fine, you’ve been able to personalize a bit of a TechEd experience, but how many companies have a big TechEd like this? Well, there aren’t many. But how many of you in the audience have a website where you collect customer information? Let’s see some hands. OK, yeah, pretty much everybody’s got a website that collects customer information.

But how many of you have provided a dashboard like this for your sales and marketing teams that allows them to understand who is coming to a particular event so they can tune their story and their anecdotes? Very, very powerful and very, very easy to do with our technology.

QUENTIN CLARK: This is great. And this is analogous to a lot of views that we look at on kind of a week-to-week basis. But we also look at a lot of non-line-of-business data sources, non-structured data sources — stuff from Twitter, stuff from our logs and all that stuff. What about that?

ERON KELLY: Yeah, exactly. And so what I wanted to highlight as well is another code name Project DataScore, that’s a great new feature in Excel. And this allows you to connect Excel to all kinds of sources. There’s kind of classic databases as well as new kinds of sources like the Windows Azure Marketplace to import third-party data sets like you talked about earlier. As well as Windows Azure.

And let me go ahead and connect right now —

QUENTIN CLARK: So the Data Explorer experience has enabled you, with search and finding things, to reach out and grab more information sets, not just type in connection strings. And it’s a key part of this whole new ability to find and connect and relate information.

ERON KELLY: There we go. There we go. We’re trying. Let me pull up the other screen here. Give me a second. (Laughter.)

QUENTIN CLARK: Yeah, so he’s just entering in the name of the cluster. So what he has is we’ve actually built out the data stores, the streams out in Azure and blobs, and we’re using HDInsight, the Azure service, to do Hadoop processing over that data set.

ERON KELLY: Exactly. So what you can see here, it’s a bunch of blobs of data. And what we’ve been tracking over the last couple of weeks is the tweets that are out there with the hashtag of TechEd.

And so what I’ve done is we’ve pulled that down into Hadoop, and we’ve gotten this.

QUENTIN CLARK: Do you understand that? How’s that?

ERON KELLY: I actually don’t understand that. But, fortunately, Data Explorer is a very, very powerful query engine. So I can start doing some transformations here on this data.

QUENTIN CLARK: So just like using any other column manipulation tools as part of Excel, he’s able to go in now and transform and change and pull things out of the various columns and pull out just the information sets, even from this large set of unstructured data that he’s really looking for.

ERON KELLY: Exactly right. And it’s so easy to do that even a marketing guy can do it. Right? And so as I’m doing it, I’m basically parsing this data into something that’s a lot more interesting.

Now I went from sort of that blob of stuff to something that looks a lot more structured. And what’s really cool is it tracks my steps. So this is repeatable. I can do this again. And even better, it scales. As you can see here —

QUENTIN CLARK: So there’s a language expression here that lets us repeat this process. So we can do it at scale over large sets of data, and it van be repeated.

So you’ve all had the experience, you get some Excel, it gets refreshed, and then you’re back in there madly changing the columns and all that stuff.

As part of operationalizing this, what we learned with Power View was having people build Power View models and operationalizing them in Analysis Server, we’re doing the same meme here.

ERON KELLY: Exactly right. So, very, very cool.

Now, I don’t want to pull all this data down because it will take a little time. So I want to go back to my favorite tool in Excel, GeoFlow. And I want to show you a fourth dimension, and that dimension is time.

OK, so here we go. These are the tweets as they’ve happened over the last couple weeks leading up to TechEd.

QUENTIN CLARK: So you hit play, and now we’re running across —

ERON KELLY: Yeah, so we’re adding the time dimension to this. So you can see some of these tweets jumping out here.

QUENTIN CLARK: I think it paused.

ERON KELLY: Oh, did I pause it? Let’s go. So we can see the tweets coming. And where do they start? They start in Redmond. We start to see those tweets coming alive in Redmond as folks at Microsoft starting to get very excited about TechEd.

Let’s roll over here to Europe and see what we have happening in Europe. Yes, there we go, we see Europe starting to come alive. We see the Swedes, the Swedes are here. They’re starting to tweet. But the Dutch, look out for the Dutch, they’re coming. Where are the Dutch in the audience? (Cheers.) There we go, we’ve got a few Dutch. (Laughter.)

Now, let’s come back to North America and see what’s happening in North America as we get, again, closer and closer to TechEd.

QUENTIN CLARK: So Redmond’s completely lit up now, now we’re seeing the east coast.

ERON KELLY: St. Louis starting to happen. Whoa, whoa, what just happened there?

QUENTIN CLARK: Something happened in Louisiana.

ERON KELLY: Something just happened down there in Louisiana. Let’s drill into that. Let’s drill into that. Where is that? Where is that? Where are all those tweets coming from? Where could those be coming from? Where?

QUENTIN CLARK: I have a suspicion.

ERON KELLY: Oh, my gosh, it’s TechEd! (Applause.) I’m out.

QUENTIN CLARK: Thank you, Eron. (Applause.)

So what you’ve seen is how the arc of embracing new insights and new kinds of data can help us, even us, change an event like TechEd. How will data change everything for you and your business? Thank you very much. (Applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON: Thanks, Quentin.

QUENTIN CLARK: Thanks, Brad.

BRAD ANDERSON: All right, what did you think about that? Isn’t that a set of capabilities that you would love to be able to expose to all your users? To the executives, to all the individuals that are driving the business? Those are wonderful, wonderful sets of capabilities.

So if I could just recap. This new world of data, as Quentin talked about, data changes everything. It’s about getting all the data, all the new kinds of data, combining it, putting rich visualization capabilities on it to really unlock all the insight.

And in this world of big data, it’s just not the data in your data centers. You’re going to be using data from partners, from service providers, from the public cloud. You really want to take advantage of the data where it lives at, but bring it all together in a way that really advances your business and allows you to, again, serve your customers even better.

All right, we’re in the home stretch, everybody. We started with devices. How we’re enabling users across all the devices. Innovation on developing the applications that get consumed on the devices. The insights that can be unlocked from all these applications. Now, let’s talk about the cloud platform itself.

And the cloud platform is required to host all the things we just walked you through.

Now, as we think about that, one of the unique positions that Microsoft is in is today we’re operating more than 200 cloud services and Windows Azure.

You know, when you are operating a set of services that are always available, always on, you’re managing across hundreds of thousands of servers, you’re deploying hundreds of thousands of servers every year. You have to automate everything. You relentlessly drive out costs and complexity because you have to be able to respond at a moment’s notice to the business. You saw how easy it was for EasyJet to just add capacity.

So one of these things I think is very unique and why I would make the statement to you that we are the best organization for you to partner with as you think about moving to the cloud is our commitment to take everything that we’re learning across these services in Azure and deliver it to you for you to benefit in your data center, whether you’re a traditional IP organization or whether you’re a service provider.

So as we were defining the R2 releases of Windows last summer, these were the things that we really focused on. First of all, we know that you’re going to be using multiple clouds, and so giving you a data center without boundaries and the ability to be able to take advantage of cloud capacity wherever it sits, one of the core principles which we designed in.

This concept of cloud innovation everywhere. So innovation in compute, in storage, in networking, in hybrid scenarios is just foundational to everything that we’ve done in this release.

And, finally, we do all this to make dynamic application delivery possible. To allow you, as Brian talked about, to build, to iterate, to learn, and to continually be in this cycle of innovating and deploying new capabilities in the applications and services that you do.

So with that, what I actually wanted to do here is just give you another example of an organization that is using these capabilities. And we’re going to hear from an organization named Trek. For those of you who mountain bike, you’re going to know who these people are. Let’s take a look at this.

(Video Segment: Trek Bicycle.)

BRAD ANDERSON: (Applause.) I love what Adam said in that. “They’re just Hyper-V VMs.” You know, all of Windows Azure runs on top of Hyper-V, it’s the same hypervisor that’s driving the public cloud that we deliver to you for running your data centers.

And I’m going to talk more about this, but this promise of consistency across all of the cloud is just fundamental to everything that we’re doing.

So, again, this morning we are announcing Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2. The previews will be available in June with these releases being available by the end of the year. Again, this is a one-year iteration for us. I can guarantee, we’ve done a lot more innovation than I think that you would expect that we’d have done in a single year.

You know, at its most basic level, what you’re seeing in these R2 releases is the learning that we’ve taken from all of the services and Azure and delivering it in the box for all of you to use. OK? It really is building on this cloud-first design principle where everything we do from an engineering perspective is focused on designing for the cloud, but delivering to you those same capabilities.

OK, let me just talk a little bit more about this consistency. Consistency across cloud is one of the things that you should absolutely have at the top of your list as you’re looking at your cloud decisions. Why is that important? If things are consistent, if you have the same virtualization, the same management, the same developer interfaces, you have the same identity and you have consistency across data, what that allows you to do is you can just move VMs and applications across clouds. No conversion, no migration, no friction. That is why this is just so critical.

So let’s get really concrete about some of the ways that we’re doing this. And I’m pleased to announce this morning a new thing that we have called the Windows Azure Pack. And what this is, it’s literally taken the innovation in Windows Azure and delivering that on top of Windows Server and System Center.

So, literally, we’re taking, we’re proving things out, we’re trying it, we’re battle testing it, we’re hardening in Azure. And then through the Windows Azure Pack, we deliver that and it just drops right on top of Windows Server and System Center.

So let me give you just a couple of examples. The portal experience that you’ve been seeing all morning where you come up and there’s this rich portal experience for your users to be able to consume the cloud capacity, that’s delivered through Azure Pack in order for you to take advantage for your customers and for your employees.

High-density Web hosting. So the ability to put, for example, 5,000 Web servers on a single Windows Server instance. Pioneered in Azure, brought to you to run in your data centers.

Things like service bus. So the ability for you to actually have all your applications connected across clouds through the service bus, delivered to you on top of Windows Server and System Center.

Finally, a set of APIs that allow developers to develop an application, and then that application will be deployed in their cloud of choice. That is what we call the Azure Pack, and bringing all that value of Azure on top of Windows Server and System Center for you.

So now let’s take a look at it. Let’s actually take a look at the self-service experience that you can now deliver out to your customers, whether you’re IT or a service provider delivering to your tenants. Let’s take a look at what we’ve done of taking that experience and now delivering that for you to use on top of Windows Server.

To do that, Clare is going to come out and give us a demo. Let’s give her a hand. (Applause.) Hey, Clare, welcome.

CLARE HENRY: Thanks, Brad. With the Windows Azure Pack, we take code that was built for the cloud in the cloud, delivered to you. Add Windows Server, add System Center, and you have an integrated stack. A stack to build your cloud. Clouds that are consistent with Azure. Let’s take a look.

Notice, this looks just like Azure. I have the same ability to deliver high-density websites, virtual machines, networking.

Take a closer look. This is a Contoso cloud, built on the Contoso Windows Server and System Center infrastructure. And I’ve logged in using my Active Directory credentials.

Look at my virtual machines I have deployed. Notice, I have a number of stand-alone virtual machines. These could be Windows Server or Linux distributions.

Take a look, I have this Web app that’s deployed with multiple instances. This is the new virtual machine role. This new role type allows you to take your application, deploy it into the VM, and then scale it out using multiple instances.

Let me show you how easy it is to deploy one of these. Click new. Go to my gallery, and because I’m logged in as Clare, I’m given this specific set of workloads. And these are pretty common workloads you’d see in your data center. Active Directory, SharePoint, SQL Server. Think of these as the IT pre-approved standard offerings. And this ability to standardize and automate these offerings really helps reduce complexity and drive optimization in your organization.

I’m going to choose IS, click through the wizard here, type in a name. Now, notice next I’m given the opportunity to choose a version. This ability to version really helps you think about the automation of those post-deployment processes, such as update and patching.

Continuing through the wizard. I’m giving a scoped set of choices such as instance count, VM size. Again, just like Azure. The ability to choose network configuration.

Now, these scoped set of options are set by you as the administrator. This is where you embed your policies, yet provide your customer a really nice set of choices.

Type in my credentials. Type them in correctly.

BRAD ANDERSON: Always so much pressure on stage.

CLARE HENRY: Yeah, you know, I’m nervous, Brad.

Now my virtual machine is configured. The next step is to configure my application. And those choices you saw in the gallery, those all have a unique set of configuration parameters.

Now, I could go forward and deploy this, and System Center and Windows Server would handle the rest. That takes a few minutes. So instead, what I want to do is show you the other dimension of self service.

I, as a user, want insight into my usage, I want to understand performance. And notice right here, I can see what kind of capacity I have left and what I’ve used in my cloud.

I also see that my IT department has provided me an update. Now, with a simple click, I could choose update right here. Or, potentially, I might want to wait until it’s more appropriate for my business needs.

Now, you saw Trek talk about how much they appreciated the elasticity and scale in Azure. You should have the same in your data center.

Going to scale, notice I have two instances deployed. With a couple of clicks, I can go from two to three to four to five. Didn’t click quite far enough there.

Now, go ahead and deploy this. I hit save. Confirm. And in a few minutes, you should see that refresh, and it starts the deployment.

Now, because it’s all powered by Windows Server and System Center, you can rest assured that this is fully automated and controlled within the parameters that you’ve set. See, it’s starting to kick off there, Brad.

BRAD ANDERSON: Awesome.

CLARE HENRY: What I’ve shown you today is truly unique in the industry. Take your skills, combine it with System Center, Windows Server, and the Windows Azure Pack, and you really have the right combo to deliver what’s next in your organization. Thank you.

BRAD ANDERSON: Thanks, Clare. (Applause.)

You know, what a concrete example of us delivering on this promise of consistency. All that rich experience and all the work that we’ve done as we’ve gone out and built this beautiful portal for all of you to interact with Azure now brought to you to run your data centers. Whether it’s giving out to your line of business, to dev-test, or to service providers giving out to their tenants.

Let me make one statement here. I think that we should use the public cloud as our benchmark. The amount of innovation, the rate of innovation that’s happening in the public cloud is what we should all strive to be delivering to all of our customers inside of our organizations as well.

Again, as Clare said, we’re unique in delivering all the things that we’re learning in the public cloud for you to use in your data centers.

Now, I’m going to kind of dive a little bit deeper on some of these pieces. We talked about consistency. But I not want to talk about, specifically, some of the things that we’re doing in the fabric.

You know, so as you think about inside of a cloud, you’ve got workloads and applications, but then you’ve got the fabric itself and you’ve got compute, you’ve got storage, and you’ve got networking.

In the R2 releases, there’s an amazing innovation. Things like the ability to live migrate across different versions of Windows Server. Taking and decreasing our utilization and our charge-back, bill-back down to the same minute interval that Scott talked about inside of Azure.

With storage, our goal is literally to deliver highly available storage on commodity hardware and give you all the benefits of what we actually do in Azure.

You know, inside of our data centers, everything runs on just commodity, direct-attach storage. But yet, we deliver all of the benefits and value that, historically, you’ve had to purchase a SAN to do. So giving that at an incredibly low cost.

And then networking. So all the things you would expect from software-defined networking, the ability to stretch and extend your network out to your service providers and to Azure, as well as provide that isolation between your customers or between your tenants.

Now, there’s just so much to demonstrate here that we wanted to spend the remainder of the time we had just demoing the things that we’ve been doing in this space. And we entitled this demonstration Cloud Innovation Everywhere. So with that, let’s get Jeff on stage and let’s take a look at some of these things. Give him a hand. (Applause.) Hi, Jeff, let’s go.

JEFF WOOLSEY: Hey, thanks Brand. Pleasure to be here.

How’s everybody doing? Oh, come on. How’s everybody doing? (Cheers, applause.)

Windows Server and System Center 2012 R2 are about making your business more agile, your data centers more flexible, and providing you optimized cloud infrastructure.

Let’s start by taking a look at storage. Now in Windows Server 2012, we introduced Storage Spaces to pool disks and provide flexible, fault-tolerant storage. In Server 2012, we’re going to take Spaces to the next level by dramatically improving performance and scale while lowering your cost per gigabyte and per IOP, let me show you.

Here, you can see I’ve got a storage pool with 17 terabytes of storage. This pool consists of 20 hard disks and four SSDs. I’ve got the hard disk for capacity and the SSDs for IOPS performance.

Now, wouldn’t it be great if the storage just automatically moved the hot blocks into the SSD to give you great performance? We think so too. That’s why we’re delivering automated storage tiering in Windows Server 2012 R2.

Let me show you. Let’s go and create a brand new disk off this pooled storage. And you can see I’m going to create this tiered storage. I can choose between a simple or mirrored layout. I’m going to go for mirrored for better reliability.

I can choose between a two- or the new three-way mirror to give you better resiliency. And now I can choose the size of the tier. Notice that I can choose the size of the SSD and hard disk tiers independently.

Now, to keep this simple, I’m just going to choose the maximum for both. And in just a couple of clicks, I’ve created tiered storage.

BRAD ANDERSON: It couldn’t be any more simple than that. (Applause.)

JEFF WOOLSEY: Couldn’t be any more simple than that.

BRAD ANDERSON: Let’s see it in action.

JEFF WOOLSEY: Absolutely. So now that we’ve created the tiered storage, let’s show you what this means in terms of performance.

So what we have here is a SQL load test. There’s no better way to show you IOPS performance.

So here, I’ve got direct attach and the remote file storage. And the thing I want to show you here is you can see that with Windows File Server, we have performance that’s on par with direct attach storage. You can see we have about 7400 IOPS for direct attach versus remote file.

Now I’m going to run that same test, this time using the remote file storage with tiering. Hold onto your seats, everybody, because we just went from 7400 IOPS to over 124,000 IOPS. (Applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON: All through software.

JEFF WOOLSEY: You’re seeing a 16X performance improvement just by using storage tiering. To put this in context, if you wanted this amount of IOPS with traditional disks, you’d need over 360 15K disks to deliver this. We’re giving you 20 hard disks and four SSDs. So that’s how we’re going to reduce your cost per IOP. Now let me show you how we’re going to reduce your cost per gigabyte.

So I’m going to go up here and I’m going to show you I’ve got two volumes. I’ve got Volume D and I’ve got Volume E. They’re both exactly the same data on both, except D is using non-deduplicated storage. You can see it’s almost full. The second one is using deduplication. You can see we’ve saved over 97 percent. These disks are filled with virtual machines for a VDI deployment. And I’m saving over 194 gigabytes of storage.

Now, wouldn’t it be great if I could use this dedupe storage for running virtual machines? Now, before you do that, you’d want to think, well, hold on here. I don’t want to do something that’s going to negatively impact performance. You’d want to know if there’s going to be some performance impact.

Well, what if I told you we could enable deduplication and actually provide better performance? Let me show you.

We’re going to go to split screen here. And what you can see here is I’ve just started up 10 virtual machines. Five of those virtual machines are running on dedupe storage, five of those virtual machines are running on non-dedupe storage. In the split screen, you can see the connection windows, one on the dedupe, one on the non-dedupe, so you can see the virtual machines as they’re booting up.

Now, this little tool we created is just calling the PowerShell, it’s simultaneously started all 10 virtual machines. The other thing it’s doing is monitoring IP addresses. So you can see that the virtual machines running on deduplicated storage are booting up faster. A lot faster. In fact, over twice as fast. How is this possible?

Well, what we’re doing is with deduplication, we’re afforded the opportunity because we know where all those common blocks live to intelligently cache the storage. So what this means is we can give you better storage performance and storage efficiency with deduplication and with running virtual machines.

So now you’ve got running virtual machines and tiered storage all built into Windows Server 2012 R2. Folks, I’m just getting warmed up. (Laughter.)

Let’s get to one of your favorite topics, live migration. Now, in Windows Server 2012, quite honestly, we led the industry in terms of innovation. We’re the first hypervisor to ship with shared-nothing live migration. And we’re back again, this time to show you some major enhancements in performance.

I’m going to start off a couple of tests. This first one is running — is live migrating a VM from Windows Server 2012 to Server 2012, the second one is live migrating a VM between two hosts running Windows Server 2012 R2. The virtual machine is the same in both. It has 8 gigabytes of memory, it’s running SQL, it’s running under massive load, so there’s a whole bunch of memory churning.

The first one is using 2012, the second one is using 2012 R2 and using our brand new live migration compression.

What we’re doing here is we’re taking advantage of the fact that we have lots of cores, lots of extra compute. In fact, rarely is a Hyper-V server ever compute bound. So what we’re doing is using a little bit of that compute to actually compress the virtual machines before we do the live migration, which means we can be much more efficient. And, in fact, the live migration is already done. Pretty awesome now. Huh? Oh, come on. (Applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON: I think you need to do better.

JEFF WOOLSEY: Now, live migration with compression is awesome. But you know what? We’re not done there. We’re actually going to take it a step further. In Server 2012, we introduced SMB Direct with RDMA to dramatically improve performance for our file server. Well, guess what? We’re now bringing that to live migration.

So now I’m doing a third test. This one is with live migration using SMB Direct and using RDMA. Again, same virtual machine, 8 gigs of memory, SQL under massive load. And this is all churning and churning while this live migration is happening. (Applause.) With RDMA, even faster.

The other nice thing to point out with RDMA is because it’s remote DMA, there’s no extra CPU utilization. All built into Server 2012 R2.

Finally, let me get to one of your other favorite technologies, Hyper-V Replica. Hyper-V Replica is our easy replication technology built right into Hyper-V. It allows us to basically protect your data by replicating your virtual machines and it’s very flexible.

Now, we’ve listened to you very carefully, and you really have one big ask. OK? Your big ask is, Jeff, we really want to be able to manage Replica at scale. I’m used to, for example, here I am at Contoso, and I’m using to managing everything with VMM. This is how I manage all my Hyper-V, but I’m used to being able to manage all my virtual machines at scale.

However, I also want to be able to manage this across sites. So, for example, here I am in New Orleans, but I also have a site in L.A., I have a site in New York, in fact, maybe I have sites around the world.

Well, we’ve heard you loud and clear and we want to solve that. So that’s why we’re introducing Hyper-V Recovery Manager. Hyper-V Recovery Manager is that centralized management console. It allows me to manage all of my site management, my site migration, whether it’s planned or unplanned, across multiple sites. And it’s a service that’s run on Azure. So there’s nothing to install, there’s no complex installation to do. It’s already there and waiting for you.

One thing I want to point out and be very clear is Hyper-V Recovery Manager is orchestration. The replication still occurs site to site. So this is exactly what you want. You want to replicate between your sites from New York to New Orleans, but none of that gets transferred to Azure. Azure just manages and orchestrates the replication.

So I was just showing you Contoso Corp running on-prem. Here, you can see those are the 13 virtual machines that I’m protecting. And, in fact, I can go here into the protected items and I can see both my disaster recovery site, my secondary site, as well as my primary site. And, in fact, here are those virtual machines that I’m running here on-premises all protected with Hyper-V Recovery Manager.

Hyper-V Recovery Manager is more than just orchestrating and managing replication. You want to do more than that. Because when you’re doing site migration, really what you want is you want to plan. You want to make sure that when you migrate to a new site, whether it’s a planned or an unplanned migration, you want to make sure that you’ve got a recovery plan to systematically bring up your second site in an orderly fashion. And that’s exactly what we have here. Think about it as your runbook in the cloud.

So right here I’ve got pre-initialized environments. I can bring up my group, my first set of virtual machines. You can say I have these groups, here’s my SQL Server’s coming up first, my Web tier, my app tier, all coming up in an orderly fashion.

And of course it’s not just limited to virtual machines. I can add things like scripts as well. I can even add manual actions in there as well.

Finally, if that day arises and you need to do a migration, and hopefully it is a planned one, how do you do it? Well, you simply come on over here to failover, I’m going to go ahead and choose a planned failover. Quite simply, you confirm those are the sites I want to migrate, and click OK. And just like that, I’m doing a planned migration. DR has never, ever been this easy.

So with massive integration in storage, massive innovation in live migration and Hyper-V Recovery Manager, these are just a few of the dozens of reasons why Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2, and Windows Azure is the best way to cloud optimize your business. Thank you very much. (Applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON: Thanks, Jeff.

JEFF WOOLSEY: Thanks, Brad.

BRAD ANDERSON: Wow! I’ll tell you, one of the favorite days that we have in the engineering organization at Microsoft is as we complete every milestone, we have something we call Demo Day. And it literally is where every one of the teams come up and show in literally three-minute demos the innovation they’ve done in that milestone.

A couple of Fridays ago as we were doing Demo Day for the final release of these R2 releases, we sat back and it was inspiring how much innovation the team had done as we changed the engineering processes to get more value quicker.

You know, this Demo Day is kind of like speed dating for nerds. But it is absolutely one of the absolute best days of the year.

Now, let me talk a little bit more about this concept of cloud innovation. OK? Literally the thing that you saw there, and specifically I want to just hone in on what Jeff did on backup and recovery. If you were to compare that to others in the industry, other virtualization vendors would charge you expensive add-ons. You can’t even say they nickel and dime you, they “Benjamin Franklin” you. And it’s complex to set up.

These capabilities allow you to do this in minutes, and it’s simple and it’s traditionally what Microsoft has done where we literally come in and help bring all this together.

So data center without boundaries, cloud innovation everywhere, and really enabling you to deploy your applications dynamically. The foundation and the concept of these R2 releases.

All right, so let’s bring everything together here. We started this journey today and we started talking about the devices and the work that we’re doing in Windows. We talk about all the work that we’re doing in Windows Server and System Center and Intune to enable your users across their devices.

We then talk about innovations in Azure and Visual Studio to enable our modern applications.

Through SQL and through Excel, being able to visualize and get insight from all the data that’s created from those applications, and now we just covered all the innovation we’re doing in the platform and how we’re bringing the value of Azure to you to run in your data centers.

You know, people ask me, “What’s Microsoft’s vision of the cloud?” It really is quite simple. It’s the Cloud OS. And that’s what we’ve spent the last two hours covering with you.

In the Cloud OS, we have four promises. We promise that we will empower people-centric IT. We covered that. We promised that we would enable modern applications to be built, we covered that. We promised that we would help you unlock all the insights in the data. We covered that. And, finally, we promised that we would help you transform your data centers in this move to the cloud.

And, you know this is far more than a vision. We are executing on this. Look at what we just announced this morning in terms of new releases, new updates coming to all the core products and how they line up with each of those promises of the Cloud OS.

You know, one of the most interesting conversations that I had in the last couple of months is I was talking with a number of leaders from some of the VMware user groups. And they made a statement to me that I thought was very poignant that I just want to relate to you.

They said, “Many of us were made heroes in our organizations because we took out incredible cap-ex because we virtualized everything.” They said, “Looking at what you’re delivering now, we can see that we can become heroes again. We can take down the spend of the expensive licenses that we’re buying from others in the market, use what you have just in Windows Server, in System Center, in SQL, and take down the spend and be heroes again.”

Let’s take one final look at Aston Martin. We started the day with Aston Martin, let’s take one final look at what they’re doing because I think they’ve done a wonderful job at embracing the entire Cloud OS vision from Microsoft. Let’s take a look.

(Video Segment: Aston Martin.)

BRAD ANDERSON: (Applause.) Really, honestly, nothing I can add to what they said there.

So let’s just end here. First of all, I encourage you to really sit back and take a look and think and reflect on what we’ve introduced today. Take a look at the opportunities here at the event. I would encourage you to take a look at the session guide. We’ve actually added additional classes this morning. And, please, attend the foundation classes that are immediately after this right here. We’ll go deeper, deeper, and deeper into these four promises and give you more details on that.

So with that, let me say thank you. Thank you for spending the time here with us at TechEd. Thank you for allowing us to partner with you on your businesses. Let’s together go out and change the world. Let’s advance your businesses. Let’s advance your careers. And, literally, let’s change the world, everybody. Thank you, have a great conference. (Applause.)

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