VOICE: For more than 50 years information technology has powered global innovation. And today, IT is in the midst of radical change as cloud computing transforms the landscape.

How can your organization take advantage of the new opportunities? Imagine data centers without boundaries, capacity on-demand. Imagine information crossing the globe seamlessly and securely, a modern platform for the world’s applications.

At Microsoft we unlock the full range of possibilities. We call it the Cloud OS and it’s here now.

SATYA NADELLA: Hello and welcome to the Windows Server 2012 launch. I’m really excited to have a chance to talk about Windows Server, it’s an epic moment for us, it’s been four years in the making, and talk about our broader vision with the Cloud Operating System.

We’re going through a great transformation across the industry, from client-server to the world of connected devices and continuous services.

If you look at the transformation, it’s across the entire ecosystem. You have more and more users connected to the Web and the Internet. The number of devices these users are using is absolutely going through an explosion. If you look at the total number of devices that users are expected to be using by calendar year ’15, we expect to have twice the number of devices as the people on the planet, and this is not adding all of the industrial equipment and sensors that also will be connected.

But the real transformation begins when applications are being delivered to these devices that are all powered by continuous services. And these applications themselves are using data. They’re generating lots and lots of data, as well as reasoning on top of all of this data and powering new features of intelligence and social capabilities in these applications.

The real news, of course, is that all of this transformation is being powered by servers that are delivering these applications, making all of this transformation possible.

So, with that industry transformation in mind, we have really set out to build the Cloud Operating System.

When we talk about the Cloud Operating System we have four key things in mind as we develop our innovations.

The first one is the transformation of the data center. You need to be able to take all of the resources in the data center — storage, network, compute — bring it together, share, make sure that the great utilization is available.

You want to be able to scale this up, and scale this up with elasticity so that for any given application you can have infinite scale but you can also make that elastic.

You want to have always up and always on. In other words, you want to have software power the resilience of your applications.

You want to be able to automate everything in the data center through APIs and self-service.

And we want to enable modern applications on top of all of this infrastructure. You want to have a rich set of new runtime services that enable your social, mobile, as well as big data applications.

You want to have the flexibility in the tooling and the development environments so that you can build these applications quickly.

You want to have a great rapid development lifecycle, a lifecycle that brings together both developers and management professionals to have dev ops lifecycles that are much more in tune with the dynamism that’s part of your business.

You want to have people really empowered to bring their own devices into the enterprise. For example, you want to be able to personalize every experience, every application on any device they may be using anywhere. At the same time, you want to have IT be able to have the control and the governance needed to make sure that there is security in access and all of the devices are well-managed.

And lastly, data is very much first class in this new world of the Cloud Operating System. You want to be able to support any data in any size, so from SQL to NoSQL. You want to be able to connect to the world’s information. You want to be able to blend the data that you have in your enterprise with the world’s information to create new value.

With the work we are doing in SQL as well as Hadoop we want to make sure we have support for any data, any size, anywhere.

And lastly, you want to not only have lots of data, but you want to get real insight. So, creating immersive experiences for users around data is the most important thing that the Cloud Operating System needs to provide.

That is the vision that’s really driving us to build a comprehensive Cloud Operating System platform, and deliver it with all of the flexibility choices that you as customers require.

So, that means you can deploy this Cloud Operating System in your data center, you can consume it from the partner data centers, or use it from Windows Azure.

But the consistency that we bring by ensuring the commonality of virtualization, no transformations required of hypervisor formats, management infrastructure, development infrastructure, data itself as well as identity, these commonalities are unique attributes to our Cloud Operating System vision that Microsoft brings to you.

And that is the context with which we bring Windows Server 2012 to the market today. Today, is a momentous day for us because we are announcing the availability of Windows Server 2012. It’s perhaps the biggest release of our server product in our history.

I was here in Microsoft when we launched Windows NT, and it ushered in the era of client-server, and we believe the Windows Server 2012 ushers in the era of the Cloud Operating System and we continue to take the power of software to really make sure that you can build the applications and the infrastructure needed for it in this new era.

This particular release has been four years in the making. It’s got many, many features across all of the dimensions we talked about, and we’re really excited to have an opportunity to get this to market. And many customers are already using this operating system in production.

But one of the things that’s really driving a lot of the innovation in Windows Server is the feedback loop that we have internally between our first party Internet scale properties and the feature innovation in Windows Server.

For example, Bing already has deployed Windows Server 2012 in production. So, that means our hypervisor, our .NET runtimes are all battle tested with Internet scale production services, and those capabilities are things now that you can deploy in your data centers.

And this, of course, extends to Office 365 and their use of Active Directory, Xbox Live and their use of capabilities like the virtual GPU capabilities that are there inside of Windows Server, what we have done with Outlook and Dynamics; all of these services are really consuming capabilities of Windows Server and in turn making Windows Server more robust, more capable.

We’ve had a very comprehensive early access program for Windows Server 2012 as we were building it and developing it. And so many customers had a chance to deploy Windows Server 2012 in their development environments, as well as in production, and many of these customers are already reaping the benefits of Windows Server 2012, and I wanted to have a chance to share some of those experiences with you.

(Begin video segment.)

Equifax: What we’re seeing today with Windows Server 2012 is revolutionary. It’s not just a couple little fixes, it’s a huge release and it’s a huge different experience than what we’ve had before.

Marquette University: With Server 2012 I think Microsoft has pretty much leveled the field when it comes to the hypervisor with virtualization.

EmpireCLS: Hypervisor Replica now allows us to move virtual machines through both our private and public cloud locations seamlessly while they’re live. We’re seeing very significant performance improvement across the globe.

Outsourcery: Our customers can run applications and services and actually achieve more in their business using the power of Windows Server and System Center together.

BMO Capital Markets: I don’t see any workloads known to mankind that cannot be ported to a Microsoft platform at this point.

EmpireCLS: Windows Server 2012 makes my life easier when I don’t have to worry about things after hours, things I know are running, they’re solid.

Equifax: With Windows Server 2012 we don’t need to be concerned in the private development team about our maintenance windows.

Menzies Aviation: Active Directory and Windows Server 2012 together with Hyper-V, virtualizing it, it brought so much more security.

Rackspace: With Windows Server 2012 it’s building a great foundation for the future.

(End video segment.)

SATYA NADELLA: The industry is also ready for Windows Server 2012. We’ve had a comprehensive program to work with all the constituents of the broad ecosystem around Windows Server, from hardware manufacturers who have optimized their hardware for Windows Server 2012 to take advantage of some of the new capabilities around storage, around networking, around compute and management.

We’ve got service providers all over the world already deploying Windows Server 2012. So, that means the service provider cloud is available with Windows Server 2012.

We’ve had ISVs who have certified their applications for Windows Server 2012, and they’re also taking advantage of new capabilities in Windows Server 2012 to exploit the advances there, as well as we have a broad set of partners who are now capable of deploying, helping you upgrade, helping you migrate and take advantage of Windows Server.

So, in conclusion, I wanted to talk about our commitment to the Cloud Operating System.

We are really excited about this new era of the Cloud Operating System, because we believe that it delivers the most comprehensive and consistent platform that is required of modern data centers and modern applications.

We’re unique in the feedback cycle that we have with the Internet scale properties that are really driving some of the innovations in the Cloud Operating Systems, and we’re also unique in the fact that we can provide the Cloud Operating System in your data center, in partner data centers, as well as with Windows Azure. And by doing so we believe that you will get the best economics and the best flexibility needed in order to move your data center and your applications forward.

And now you’ll have a chance to hear from Bill Laing, Scott Guthrie, and Brad Anderson on more of the details of the Cloud Operating Systems and the innovations that are built into Windows Server 2012.

And so I hope you have a chance to look at all of those presentations, as well as take a fresh look at Windows Server 2012 and what it can do for your modern data centers, as well as your modern applications.

Thank you very much.

END