Steve Ballmer: Worldwide Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 Launch

Remarks by Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft Corporation
Worldwide Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 Launch

San Francisco, California
November 7, 2005

Editors’ Note, January 10, 2006 – Brief portions of this transcript have been updated, as noted below, to correct misstatements.

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the chief executive officer of the Microsoft Corporation, Steve Ballmer.

STEVE BALLMER: Nine o’clock, Monday morning, oh my goodness! It’s a real honor and privilege for me to have a chance to be here in San Francisco with the almost 3,000 folks gathered for this launch event. And as interestingly, we have folks connected from around the United States, around the world, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and many, many other countries, all participating in this launch of three of the most exciting products we’ve ever had a chance frankly to put in the marketplace for software developers around the world.

I want to start by just giving you a little bit of a sense of my enthusiasm for what we’ve got. It is albeit been a little bit long in the making on some of these products, and maybe a little bit less bake time — well, at least a little it more rapid cycle time would be appropriate in the future, but we had a little bit of work to do, we learned a lot over the last few years about security, and I’ll be darned if we weren’t going to apply that learning wholeheartedly in these major releases.

But we’ve got absolutely a phenomenal set of products today, a new app platform with business intelligence deeply ingrained in it, unprecedented — yeah, baby — unprecedented partner support, and we’ll talk a little bit about that as we go through, and you’ll see that we’ve already got customers from large enterprises to hosters to students to enterprise developers doing exciting things with the product lines.

So I’m very, very excited to have a chance to be here today with you.

I’ve got to tell you a little secret, because I’m feeling a little bit like a clown here on stage today. I was on vacation — don’t tell anybody — I was on vacation the last three or four days, and I was sort of semi-somnambulant when I packed. So I packed everything for kind of a beach vacation and I packed a suit, not really thinking about the fact we were doing a developer event on Monday, so I’m sitting here in a suit today in front of an audience of developers, so I ask for your humble, humble, humble apology in advance.

Let me first before I go on and really talk about the products, have a chance to say thank you to a large number of people. This is a major advance for the product set and we’re really celebrating a great milestone for Microsoft and for the industry. But we used a bit of a different methodology on the development of these products than perhaps any other products Microsoft has ever put into the marketplace. We really used this notion of Community Technical Previews to make sure that we were getting help from and input from IT pros, software developers, partners, customers, big customers, small customers in a way that was unprecedented.

We had over 18,000 bugs submitted against these products and received over 8,500 suggestions to the MSDN product feedback center that all helped shape and drive and form the products that we’re putting in the market today.

And the commitment that folks in this room and in rooms like this around the world show have really helped us, really helped us to make these products better.

So to all of you I’d say thank you, thank you, thank you, and especially those of you who are in our “rock star” t-shirts, I’d say a triple thank you, thank you, thank you, we really appreciate all of the help and input you’ve given us.

So please, a round of applause for our rock stars. (Applause.)

Before I talk about some of what’s in the product, I want to start a little bit what you might call philosophically, but I think it’s very important. I could get up here and just talk about all the new features and benchmarks and blahdy, blahdy, blahdy-blah, but the truth of the matter is all of us, all of us who are in the software industry at the end of the day are trying to think through how we improve the lives of an end customer, a consumer, an information worker in business, et cetera.

We talk about our mission as a company, and maybe it’s really our mission as an industry to enable people and businesses around the world to realize their full potential. So you’ve got to have a sense of what we’re trying to do for that end customer so that we can enable everybody in this room as software developers to really deliver the goods, because whether you’re in software development or whether you’re an IT professional, we still at the end of the day are trying to build systems, manage systems and run systems that help people get their job done better; people who are looking to make better decisions and getting to results faster; people who need to be connected, connected to the business processes that they’re involved in, connected to other people for communications, collaboration, and connected to the information that will let them make better decisions

And so we are always trying to think through how do we let you build solutions more quickly so that you can give solutions to your end users more quickly; how do we make it easier for you to bring alive the information in these systems by putting nice end user interfaces, integrating in with products like Microsoft Office and Outlook and Excel, which are so broadly available, to connect people and information. So we focus on that familiarity and ease of use.

We think it’s very important for us to be innovative, not only so that you can move faster and do new things, but so that you can surprise and delight the people that you serve.

And last but certainly not least, it’s important for us to do this in a context in which the platform on which you’re working is trusted. You have to trust it for its security, its reliability, its scalability, and users have to trust it because of the range of independent software vendors and partners who embrace it and support it. We all have to be able to trust that it’s going to be there for us 7 by 24.

So innovation that helps connect people to process, information and other people, all running on a trusted platform with an end goal of letting people make better decisions and get faster results, whether that’s somebody, a bank teller who’s trying to sell an additional product to one of their customers, whether that’s an end customer who’s trying to put up a Web site and do a better job of attracting and managing customers, it’s always about faster results, better insight and better decisions.

And those principles really guided us as we developed the products we’re launching today, and everything else frankly that fits into the broader Microsoft application platform.

When we think of our app platform, we don’t just think of .NET or Visual Studio or Windows or SQL Server, we’re really thinking about the broader platform: SharePoint, Windows clients, Microsoft Office, our Dynamics product set, the development tools and the management tools, and, of course, all running on a foundation that’s grounded in XML, Web Services, industry standards, and our own .NET innovations.

Last week, we announced our Live services. We know we need to extend our platform from clients and server all the way on out to the cloud for you to really deliver faster results and better decisions to the broadest constituency of people.

So it’s a broad platform and today we’re talking about three of the most important products.

.NET, our DSI initiative for manageability, these are all important pieces, and in some senses I think I can fairly say we’re at least at version 2, maybe version 3 of our next generation platform. Back about five years ago, when we launched .NET, we were really at kind of v.1, and we launched .NET, we launched a new version of SQL Server; since that time we’ve put versions of SharePoint, we’ve done some Office updates, but it’s really this cycle of products that I think gives us the next generation and it’s a next generation that is bold and innovative, but it’s still a refinement and build on all of the concepts that we’ve been pioneering over the last five years.

We’re trying to give you the tools to connect systems together in a way that allows better decisions to be made, and for you to deliver faster results. We’re trying to build all of this on some common technologies so that you can get those kinds of faster results. So this broad app platform is now entering in its next generation, and those of you who are here are really all at the forefront of what’s going on.

As we think about this, I think it’s also important for me to highlight the broad commonality across this platform: one programming model, one management model, one business intelligence model, one security model, one user identity model supports the entire platform so that a few common concepts will be important to you as you pull together from our toolbox to build and implement the applications that are important to you.

Over the course of the first generation of this platform I’d say we’ve built some real, real momentum. I remember when we launched .NET five years ago, people were saying, “Oh, I don’t know, can these guys catch up, Java, blah, blah-blah, blah-blah.” Here we sit five years later, and you survey — and these are independent surveys, IDC — survey people and say what platform are you using for mission critical applications, 35 percent of customers will say .NET to 25 percent for Java.

Now, some of you will add that up and say it only adds to 60, what the heck else is there: 16 percent will say mainframe, 16 percent will say earlier versions of Windows, not .NET, and 8 percent will say earlier or different forms of UNIX and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So 35 percent, number one clearly is .NET, and if you take Windows as a whole, it’s over 50 percent of the mission critical application decisions that people are making.

If you take a look at where we are in the marketplace today with SQL Server, in calendar year ’04 SQL Server outsold DB2 plus Oracle combined on a unit basis, 406,000 for SQL Server, 245,000 for Oracle, only 72,000 for IBM.

If you take BizTalk Server and compare it to its competitors, we have more customers in this category than anybody else, and we’re adding over 300 new customers per quarter, which is really, really quite phenomenal.

So all told in this first generation of the platform, we’ve gone from not there to number one with a strong bullet of momentum, and then on top of that you get the phenomenal product line that we’re introducing today.

I’m going to talk about security and reliability and scalability of the platform, but I want to make sure first you get something of a sense of the new features and capabilities that we’re launching today across the product line. And I want to start in the center with Visual Studio. Visual Studio in some senses for many of you is the anchor tenant, the mission critical tool that you live in every day.

We have up to 70 percent reduction in code sizes, amount of code you need to write to generate important applications.

For the first time we’ve delivered a set of lifecycle tools for software development in the Visual Studio Team System products that we’re launching today.

We’ve made an unprecedented investment in security testing tools. Everything we’ve learned about how to go through a source code and find potential security vulnerabilities we’re putting in Visual Studio to put it in front of you so you too can write more and more secure code.

And the set of tools we’ve invested in and built in this area is really quite dramatic. In independent surveys, when people compare what we have for security testing and verification to IBM or anybody else, we stand clearly number one, yet we know there’s still more to do.

With SQL Server we’ve really done a lot of work first and foremost to integrate .NET right into the heart of the database engine so you get a common programming model. And for those of you who know how to write .NET code today, you’re not off having to learn new language and new approach. We’ve dramatically ramped up the performance and we have a set of new capabilities that we’re going to demonstrate for you today in business intelligence reporting and analytics.

And in BizTalk Server we’ve really done a lot of work again to integrate management and development with the rest of the Microsoft product line, to improve process automation and add in real time alerts.

What you’ll see as we launch new versions of Office and SharePoint later this year is those products will flank and complement this set of offerings.

We’re open; you can obviously choose somebody else’s database or somebody else’s front-end software to use with our stuff, but we’re going to try to make absolutely sure that the whole of the Microsoft environment, if you will, is bigger than the sum of the parts, as I talked about earlier with the common execution environment, security, et cetera.

So this is a big, big, big launch for us, and as it ought to be with the amount of time that has passed since the last releases. This is perhaps the most significant launch of SQL Server ever, it’s perhaps the most amazing launch of Visual Studio ever, and it is certainly the most important launch of BizTalk Server ever.

So we’re proud of this, there’s a lot of new capabilities, and we thank again all of you who participated in the Community Technical Preview for helping us to refine these capabilities.

Discussion is never as good as reality, so to show you some of the new capabilities, and to bring them to life we’re going to do a demonstration, and I’d like to invite Prashant Sridharan of our Visual Studio group to come up on stage and have a chance to show you some of the fantastic new capabilities in Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006. Please welcome Prashant. (Applause.)

PRASHANT SRIDHARAN: Thanks, Steve.

STEVE BALLMER: All yours, baby! (Applause.)

PRASHANT SRIDHARAN: Thank you. Thanks, Steve.

With this application platform, you can go beyond simply connecting your systems together; now you can gain greater insight into your business. I’m going to take you through an application that shows you how SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 will enable your organization to make better decisions and obtain faster results.

Now, throughout this demo I’m going to take on several roles. First I’ll start out as the business guy, responsible for analyzing the information in my company and deciding on the strategic direction of my business. Then I’m going to be the development guy responsible for building new solutions using the Microsoft application platform. And then finally I’m going to be the marketing guy — kind of a stretch for me — where I’ll be responsible for building new marketing programs that talk about our products and our services.

So let’s go ahead and look at the screen. Now, this is our application, an online digital music store. When our customers use this application, for example, by buying a song, they generate massive amounts of data. Let’s go behind the scenes of this data and analyze how the Microsoft application platform can help us differentiate ourselves from our competition.

Now, in the past I’d have to manually cull information from a variety of different sources just to make a simple decision, but SQL Server 2005 enables business analysts like myself to quickly create and deploy robust business intelligence and reporting solutions to the people that need them.

Now, on the screen is a number of sales reports and reports about the business at my company. Let’s go ahead and take a look at one of those reports now. Now, I’m using a product from Dundas Software, a SQL Server and Visual Studio partner. Let’s go ahead and do that report. It’s taking a while to come up. But I’m going to be using a product from Dundas Software, a SQL Server and Visual Studio partner, to give my reports a print ready and professional look and feel.

Now, when my report comes up, you’ll notice that I’ve got a number of spikes in my sales over time, and these spikes will correspond to album release dates. And what it turns out is that I have a pretty seasonal business, and what I really want though is not only to increase my sales, but also to smooth out my revenue over time to increase the predictability of my business.

Now, one way we can do that is by expanding beyond simply selling digital music, but also selling a variety of services related to the music that people buy. So, for example, when I buy a song, I might also want to buy concert tickets or merchandize related to the band that I just bought a song for. Let’s go ahead and see if that makes good business sense.

Now, our partner, our concert ticket partner has exposed some of their sales data to us, and naturally they’ve exposed that information via a Web Service. I’m going to use BizTalk Server 2006 to connect with that data and determine whether or not it makes sense for me to pursue this partnership.

Now, on the screen on the left hand side you can see the structure of my partner’s data, and on the other side, the right hand side you can see the structure of my own data. If we examine this more closely, we’ll notice that our partner stores their revenue as a combination of an amount field and a currency field, a local currency. If we look at our data, we’ll notice that that’s not how we store our own information, we store simply a single file for revenue.

I’m going to use the BizTalk Server 2006 mapper to combine my partner’s amount and currency fields and map that to my own amount field. In the past, this kind of effort was a manual and tedious process, but now with BizTalk Server 2006 and SQL Server 2005, integration and analysis of information is significantly easier.

So not only is the structure of my and my partner’s data different, but so probably is the format of the data as well. I need to clean up that information before I can proceed with my analysis. To do that, I’ll use the new SQL Server Business Intelligence Studio. Now, you’ll notice that the BI Studio functionality is hosted inside of Visual Studio 2005. This enables all members of my organization to use the same tools in a consistent manner.

Now, when we look at our partner’s data and our data side by side we’ll probably notice several discrepancies, things like duplicate entries, things like the name field and the address field being formatted differently. I need to clean up that in order to get a proper analysis of my systems. To do that, I’ll use the integrated fuzzy lookup editor inside of SQL Server 2005. This enables me to use a powerful data cleansing utility to ensure the integrity of my data, even if they come from a variety of different sources. The advanced threshold bar helps me specify to SQL Server how much I want SQL Server to do the automated matching on my behalf.

So now our data and our partner’s data and the structure of our data and the structure of our partner’s data are aligned. Let’s go ahead and see whether or not it makes sense to partner with this concert ticket vendor.

To do that, I’ll create a new report using the SQL Report Builder. Now, on the screen you can see the design surface for the SQL Report Builder, and you can see the annual sales of my company on here. What I want to do is overlay the sales information from my merchandize partners, as well as the sales information from my ticket partners onto this particular report. Now I can look at all this information side by side and determine whether I need to proceed.

So let’s go ahead and take a look at the results of our analysis. I’ll deploy these results to the SQL Report Manager, and you can see here I’ve got an annual sales report for what happens when I actually partner with my concert ticket vendor and my merchandize vendor. By adding these new products such as tickets and merchandize, we can draw new customers to our store and increase our sales through cross-sales. At the same time, we can notice that merchandize sales and ticket sales happen more frequently over time, so that we can try and smooth out our revenue curve as well.

This helps me satisfy my two primary business requirements, to increase my revenue and to increase the predictability of my business. Now that we know this is a good idea, we can go ahead and give the green light to proceed to our development staff.

To do that, I’m going to use a Microsoft Outlook add-in from a Visual Studio partner, Personify Design. Using this add-in I can communicate requirements from my entire organization directly to my development team.

Now, you’ll notice on the screen that my business staff has begun an e-mail thread claiming that as a result of these partnerships we can expect an additional 100,000 users to our store. I want to make sure that my development staff is aware of this requirement. So what I’ll do is I’ll use the Personify Design add-in to send this requirement directly to the development team. This requirement will then be visible to my team, my development team inside of Visual Studio, and then I can use the Personify Design product from within Microsoft Outlook to ensure that I can keep track of this throughout time.

Now, so far you’ve seen me use BizTalk Server 2006 to aggregate information from a variety of different sources. You’ve also seen me use SQL Server 2005 to do an analysis on that information. Let’s go ahead and now see what happens when the development staff needs to actually implement the application.

We’ll use Visual Studio 2005 on the development side. So let’s go ahead and say that now I’m the developer, and inside the development organization we’ll be able to see a list of requirements that have been sent to us, and including one of those requirements is the requirement from our business staff that we support 100,000 users.

So again now I’m going to be the developer. I would take off my suit but that wouldn’t be a good idea, so I’ll go ahead and pretend now that I’m the developer. And so let’s now start by designing the business process to see how we interact with our own internal systems with our trading partners’ systems.

To do that, I’ll use the BizTalk Server 2006 Orchestration Designer. With this tool I can specify how my internal systems will connect and integrate with my partner’s systems. From here I can design the architecture of the application itself.

Now, Visual Studio 2005 includes this design surface for visualizing my service-oriented applications. You can see that I’ve already attached my BizTalk business process to the design surface and now I need to connect it up to the rest of my systems. Up to now, visualizing these kinds of applications has been pretty difficult, but now with Visual Studio 2005 it’s just a matter of drag, drop and connect. And now this BizTalk business process, as well as my partner’s systems, will be visible throughout the rest of my application architecture.

Now, this is a service-oriented application, which means that before we deploy it we need to make sure that it will work inside the datacenter. Visual Studio also includes this design surface for visualizing my network topology. Now, this isn’t just a pretty picture. Using this diagram I can make sure that the application I designed in that other diagram I just showed you a second ago will, in fact, work inside my operational environment. I’ll simply right-click on the design surface and validate this diagram.

Now, you’ll notice that I’ll get a couple of security errors. With Visual Studio 2005 we can detect security errors like these at design time, before they become too costly to fix in a production environment. Once I resolve these security errors, I’ll have a reasonable degree of confidence that my solution will, in fact, work inside the datacenter.

This is what we call designing for operations and it’s a key deliverable of our Dynamic Systems Initiative.

Okay, so now we know that our application architecture is solid, we know that our application work will work in the datacenter; let’s get down to writing some code.

Visual Studio includes this class diagram or class designer for visualizing my application’s code. From here I’ll jump into the code editor itself.

Now, we’ve done a lot of things inside the Visual Studio code editor to make individual developers or to help individual developers be more productive. For example, I can insert a code snippet that contains a chunk of commonly written code. At the top of the screen you’ll notice I’m programming in Visual Basic and I’m using the My Classes. The My Classes not only save significant lines of code, but they also significantly reduce the learning curve of the .NET Framework. With Visual Studio 2005, with the .NET Framework 2.0 and with features like My Classes and code snippets, we suspect that most developers will see an up to 70 percent code reduction in common scenarios. That will certainly enable all of our developers to obtain faster results. (Applause.)

So let’s say — yeah, it’s great.

Now, let’s say that we’re done coding our application and now we want to make sure that this application will, in fact, respond well to the rigorous performance demands that our users will place on it.

Now, you’ll notice on the screen that I’ve got a load test, and if you recall, my business manager told me early on that I need to support 100,000 additional users. Now, I’ve already run my performance test and Visual Studio includes integrated load testing tools that help me check for the quality and performance of my application throughout the development cycle. What I want to do is make sure that my entire organization knows that I have satisfied this requirement, that I have met their needs in terms of making sure that this application will work with 100,000 users.

So what I’ll do is I’ll select a report that’s generated by this load test and attach it to that work item, and now everybody in my organization can see that not only has this requirement been satisfied but the proof is attached to that requirement as well.

With Visual Studio 2005 we help your entire organization, from your business analysts all the way to your network operators, communicate and collaborate more effectively so that they can obtain faster results throughout the development lifecycle.

Okay, so far what we’ve seen is SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 helping us aggregate our data and analyze information so that we can make effective business decisions. We’ve also seen how Visual Studio 2005 can increase our productivity and help us obtain faster results.

Let’s go back to our application now and this time let’s go ahead and buy a different song. You’ll notice that we’re also presented with merchandize and ticket information when we go ahead and buy this particular item.

Now, of course, this application continues to generate massive amounts of data in the background, but that data is not just the exclusive domain of IT professionals and database analysts.

So let’s say that I’m now the marketing guy and my job is to build programs and to engage with my customers to help them understand the value of my products and services. With our upcoming waves of products, Microsoft will empower everyone in your organization to obtain faster results and make better decisions.

Let’s see an example of that with the upcoming Microsoft Office 12. Now, Microsoft Office 12 applications include a results-oriented user interface that helps you find the tools you need based on the job you’re trying to do. In this case I’m going to connect directly to my SQL Server 2005 database from within Microsoft Excel 12. Now, from here what I want to do is I want to analyze the information about our partnership. I want to see whether or not our merchandize partnerships and our ticket partnerships have been successful for us, and if they aren’t, let’s go fix that.

So what I’m going to do is I’m going to create a pivot table inside of Excel 12. Now, pivot tables are an inherently useful feature inside of Microsoft Office and now that we can connect directly to our SQL Server 2005 database we can make them even more valuable.

What I’ll do is I’ll attach some data to my pivot table. For example, I want to see how much our merchandize has been selling, how much our tickets have been selling, and I also want to see how much our albums have been selling. And I’ll organize that data over a period of time and I’ll organize it by geography. I’ll then format the pivot table so that I’ll get the layout that I’m looking for.

Now, with the new data bar highlighting feature I can get a quick visual representation of my data without having to parse through rows and rows of information. (Cheers, applause.) That feature is pretty hot. And the coolest thing about that feature, by the way, is that we are talking to the live data inside of SQL Server. That makes Office 12 even a lot more valuable than it is already.

All right, so we’ve connected with our live data and on the surface it appears as if our North American sales are doing quite well, but SQL Server 2005 includes the ability to store Key Performance Indicators about our business. Now, these Key Performance Indicators were authored by our business analysts and pertain to unique business rules inside of our organization.

Let me go ahead and attach the Key Performance Indicator for our company onto this spreadsheet. Now you’ll notice that even though my North American sales look really good, the Key Performance Indicator tells me that I am not performing as expected. If we were to drill down into that data, what we would find is that, yeah, we’re selling a lot of albums but we’re not selling enough merchandize and tickets to go with that, so we need to fix that problem.

So to do that, what I’m going to do is I’m going to use the new Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0, and I’m going to create a marketing campaign that will talk to my users and encourage them to purchase tickets and merchandize as well.

Now, Dynamics CRM works the way you do and it’s integrated into the applications you already know. So directly from within Microsoft Excel I’m going to launch Dynamics CRM and what I’m going to do is I’m going to look for a list of all my customers who have opted in to receive marketing offers from me. Again, I’m connecting directly to that SQL Server database that I’ve been using to run my company.

Now, here’s a list of all my customers, and what I’m going to do is I’m going to go ahead and create a new marketing campaign for all of these customers. And what I’ll do is I’ll name this marketing campaign the up-sell campaign, and then from here what I’ll do is I’ll say, hey, this is going to be an e-mail campaign and we’ll send out e-mails to all of those users who have opted in, and I’ll paste in the contents of an e-mail. Let’s give people 10 percent off merchandize for buying a song, let’s give people 10 percent off their first concert ticket purchase whenever they buy a song. So we’ll go ahead and we will send out this marketing campaign to all of our different users.

So now I want to evaluate the results of this marketing campaign. So let’s fast forward in time. Let’s say we’re about a month or a month and a half into this, and we want to see at a glance and in real time how well that campaign is performing.

Now, if you recall, Dynamics CRM works the way you do and it’s integrated into the products and tools you already use. I’ll select campaigns inside of Microsoft Outlook and I will run a report to show me the effectiveness of this particular campaign. I’m again talking to the live data inside of SQL Server 2005 and I am showing you exactly what’s going on inside my company.

Now, we’ll go ahead and show this report and what we’ll see is that our campaign is actually performing fairly well, and we know from looking at this particular report, which will come up shortly, that I know that I have now done my job as a marketing manager to deliver this particular campaign. And we can see here the campaign’s performance report.

Now, as business professionals we can use Office 12, Dynamics CRM and other upcoming Microsoft products to help us connect our entire business and make better decisions and obtain faster results.

Now, the entire Microsoft application platform empowers your people to connect to your information and your processes inside your business and enables you to drive better business results.

SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005, and BizTalk Server 2006 augment the capabilities of the application platform and enable you to make better decisions and obtain faster results.

So with that, I want to thank you and I want to introduce a customer, who’s actually seeing these results today in action using a very similar scenario. Thank you very much. (Applause.)

(Video segment.)

STEVE BALLMER: How did you guys like that demo? Is that all right? (Applause.) There’s some fantastic, fantastic stuff here, and it’s really fun to have a chance to be here and show it to you. I want to build off of the video we just saw and talk a little bit about this notion of a trusted platform. A trusted platform needs to be scalable. A trusted platform needs to be secure, Prashant talked a little bit about that. And a trusted platform needs to be one that you’ve seen other people use, and then a wide variety of partners and ISV support. HMV is an example of a customer who is doing mission critical applications on this platform, but they’re not alone. Whether it’s customers like the Australian Tax Office, Merck, JetBlue, or the London Stock Exchange itself, we have customers running mission critical applications on these platforms at scale today.

And I think that’s important for all of you to think about and consider and know when you talk to peers and other folks in your organizations about why now is a good time to move. I was in Atlanta seeing customers a couple of weeks ago, and met with three or four customers, frankly, who are looking at migration off of mainframes, and coming down onto distributed systems. They wanted to talk a little bit about .NET and SQL Server in this new round of products. And I’ll tell you, I feel like we’ve really crossed a chasm in terms of people really understanding that these are platforms for mission critical applications.

The oldest issue we’ve dealt where people are wondering about the Microsoft platform is, frankly, scalability. And if we can’t shatter any notion today, today we should be able to completely convince you that there’s no job that is too big to run entirely on the Windows and Microsoft platforms. And I’m going to show you a few benchmarks and try to really get you there. We’re going to show you some hardware and really help you understand just how far we’ve come. I want to start with a benchmark that IBM uses as their standard WebSphere benchmark. It’s called Planned By WebSphere. And we took their standard benchmark, we ran their standard benchmark on Oracle, on Linux, with WebSphere, and then we did the same benchmark with .NET 2.0, which is embedded as part of this round of releases, Windows Server 2003, and SQL Server 2005. When you add it all up and you take a look at what kind of performance you get on a standard WebSphere benchmark, not a standard .NET benchmark, we’re able to deliver about 2,900 transactions per second with .NET versus only 1,000 transactions per second with WebSphere, on their benchmark, on their benchmark.

I’ll show you some more things as we go through, but there’s a reason why the London Stock Exchange and JetBlue and Merck and blah, blah, blah, are embracing these products. And certainly taken together the whole of these product is, again, bigger than the sum of its parts. Now, part of the way we’re really getting there in terms of scalability is based on the fantastic work and effort of Intel and the hardware community broadly, and particularly of the people who build these servers. And so now I would like to, if you will, welcome on stage here with me Paul Otellini, CEO and President of Intel Corporation. Please welcome Paul. (Applause.)

PAUL OTELLINI: Thank you very, very much. And good morning, Steve. Good morning all the developers.

Intel is very, very happy to be here today. Together, Intel and Microsoft have had a very long history with SQL and Intel architecture driving innovation. Together, we invented the standard high volume server business, and we’ve been able to drive this and change data center economics year after year as a result of that. Along the way, we’ve delivered a number of important milestones. In 1999, we broke through an important scale-up milestone. Remember that?

STEVE BALLMER: I do.

PAUL OTELLINI: We were able to get SQL to support eight Intel microprocessors. In 2000, we added 64 gigabyte large memory support. And just recently, two weeks ago, with Dell Corporation, we broke through a new price/performance metric. We crossed the dollar per TPC delivery benchmark for the first time ever coming in under $1, a factor of 30 improvement in the years since 1998 when we first started this program. Really wonderful milestones along the way.

But the work together has not just been in hardware, it’s also been in software. And today we are announcing our joint support for Intel’s compilers and tools within Visual Studio. And these tools are designed to be able to let the developer unleash the power of SQL 2005, and take advantage of the Intel unique platform capabilities that we’re building in. So, for the first time also today, we’re announcing that we’re supporting Itanium 2 developers in .NET together. So, I’m very, very happy on both those announcements. (Applause.)

STEVE BALLMER: I want our press friends to note that strong support for Pentium, and strong support for Itanium.

PAUL OTELLINI: Xeon, Pentium, Xeon.

STEVE BALLMER: I’ve been in the industry too long, that means two things, I’ll never get Pentium out of my brain and, number two, my brain is getting older.

PAUL OTELLINI: You know, the data centers of the future need not only ever larger databases for the data explosion that Steve talked about, but they also need another thing from the hardware side, they need to have more compute power per square foot, or, in other words, delivering more performance per watt out of the systems that they put in the data centers. And to do this, Intel has shifted our development a couple of years ago away from delivering more and more gigahertz to moving more and more performance via multicores delivered on our microprocessors. Essentially more performance at lower and lower levels of power per microprocessor.

We’ve just recently announced a couple of new dual core machines, one for two-way systems, and one for multiprocessing systems based upon Xeon, and you’ll see a lot more coming in the first quarter. We’ve got a new product coming out using our mobile technology, code named Dothan, that is optimized for blade servers, and it will deliver twice the performance per watt of today’s existing machines.

STEVE BALLMER: I’m going to talk a little bit in a minute about our hosting customer, and particularly in some of those very large scale environments, this is as mission critical as anything we’ll talk about today.

PAUL OTELLINI: That’s right. And these guys care about electricity costs. But looking forward, we think that we need to have innovation beyond just the price performance per watt. We need to look at architectural innovations that will, together, solve the needs of IT managers. And beginning in the first quarter of next year, you’ll see a number of new technologies coming out of Intel that Microsoft software will take advantage of. And in particular the three that we’re very excited about, the first is virtualization technology, which allows for new and efficient more robust hardware environments. The second is Intel’s active management technology taken to servers. It’s in desktops today. We’re moving it to servers for more and better manageability and security. And the third one is a new technology that focuses on I/O acceleration for faster data throughput. All of these are delivered in the first quarter in our Benchley platform.

STEVE BALLMER: That’s great. What we always do with Intel has two dimensions. One dimension is to work together on the core technologies, as Paul discussed, plus to try to harness those through the software, and then really to go together to the hardware manufacturers, the OEMs who really put the systems in place that sort of ride up the technologies that we provide. Paul is going to talk about some of the OEMs who are embracing our new work with Intel’s new work. I want to highlight specifically three who grew up in the mission critical business in Japan, and some of our U.S. customers may not focus as much on, but Hitachi, Fujitsu, and NEC have really been in the business of delivering mainframe class machines for a number, a number of years, and it’s another sign of this mission critical support for our joint platforms in the enterprise.

PAUL OTELLINI: Maybe I could walk them through some of the machines we’ve got here today.

STEVE BALLMER: Fantastic.

PAUL OTELLINI: When you walked in, you may not have noticed, but on the sides of the room here, on both sides, they’re kind of lined with the hall of fame of new machines that take advantage of the best of Intel technology and the best of Microsoft’s new SQL 2005 release. And I thought we would just kind of walk our way around the room, and talk about the incredible innovation that I think is being delivered on these machines. The first machine will be over here on your right, my left, which is a Unisys machine. It’s an ES-7000. This machine scales up to 64 CPUs, integrating both Xeon and Itanium into the same system. It’s a 5-9 capable machine, which means that there’s less than 22 minutes of downtime per year per system. Great machine.

The second one we have is Hitachi, right next to it over there, and the Hitachi machine is called Blade Symphony. And this is a modular machine to deliver both Xeon and Itanium, again, in the same system integrated into a modular format which makes it very, very cost effective.

The third machine again on the right is from NEC Corporation. This is their Express 5800 machine. It’s a 32-way Itanium machine that has achieved a record TPCH decision support results for a one terabyte SQL 2005 database. And this includes NEC’s innovative crossbar architecture for performance and high scalability.

And then the last machine on the right over there is from Fujitsu. This is called Prime Quest. It’s a 32 Itanium machine, mainframe class design, all built around SQL 2005.

I’m going to shift over to this side, we’ve got Dell over here on the left in the back over there. Dell is showing both a quad and dual processor machines on their Power Edge systems. And these are the machines that run, both dual core processors, they’re running that less than $1 TPC benchmark I talked about earlier.

Next to Dell, we have IBM. IBM is here with their e-Server X Series 460. This machine delivers very, very high level of innovation around their X-3 architecture. And, in fact, today, they’re delivering very high scalability from blaze 32-way all the way up to the top.

And lastly, HP on the right there, lastly HP is here with their Prolient Xeon and Integrity Itanium machines. The Integrity Superdome machine over there is designed for performance metrics, it currently holds the SQL 2005 TPCC high water benchmark with over one million TPCs in that machine.

Together, they brought an awesome array of machines from our OEM customers, from Microsoft and from Intel hardware support.

Thank you very much.

STEVE BALLMER: Thanks, Paul, appreciate it.

PAUL OTELLINI: Thank you. (Applause.)

STEVE BALLMER: There is no partner in the world I spend more time with, frankly, than with Paul and the folks at Intel because at the end of the day, it really is making the hardware and software come together that facilitates these platforms on which we can actually help you get better decisions and faster results.

I want to switch and talk about scalability through the lens of another important partner of ours, and that’s SAP. One of the most important benchmarks and sort of performance tests, if you will, for these platforms comes from the SAP world. And I want to talk a little bit about how this next generation does, in fact, running SAP.

We have over 20,000 customers running SAP today on top of SQL Server. Windows is the most powerful implementation platform for SAP with about 70 percent, or almost 70 percent, of all installations of SAP go in on top of Windows, not on top of UNIX. And about 42 percent of all SAP installations go in with Windows and SQL Server on. If you go back to 1994 we had just a little bit of Windows and no SQL. So today you can see the incredible progress on the chart on the right hand side of the slide showing how systematically as we’ve improved these products, more, and more, and more customers have chosen to implement SAP on top of the Microsoft platform.

With the new version of SQL Server what we get is another quantum leap in terms of our ability to run SAP very well. On SQL Server 2000 we could support about 26,000 concurrent users, not total users but concurrent users. The benchmarks that we’re announcing today for SAP on SQL Server 2005 is 93,000 concurrent users, which is about 10X the largest SAP implementation in the world.

We have a very close relationship with SAP. I think everybody understands we have a level of competition in the mid-market, but as we go to market in large enterprises, we’re really very aligned. Our engineers sit at the SAP headquarters to ensure that we get the kind of performance that you see here, and the kind of interoperability that people want.

We’re also announcing today a set of programs with SAP to really go to market as we go forward. We signed a new multi-year licensing agreement, in which SQL Server 2005 can be offered as an integrated component, with the SAP product family directly by SAP. Ed said he will support SQL 2005 starting today, and we have a set of programs that we’ve launched together with SAP to go take market share from Oracle, as the application and database platform in largest enterprises.

So a strong, robust relationship, built on a deep technical partnership that was enhanced dramatically by the product improvements in our new suite of products starting with .NET 2.0, and of course most importantly, SQL Server 2005, a big step forward.

Let me build on this, though, and show you a little bit of what we’ve got in terms of overall benchmark at this stage for SQL Server 2005. What we show you here is some benchmarks, TPCC on the left of the slide, TPCH, that is decision support query benchmarked, on the right. We show you 4P, 16P, and 64P, in terms of transaction benchmarks, and we show you 100 gigabytes, a terabyte, and 3 terabytes with a variety of processor configurations on the right. You can see the names of hardware manufacturers who provided some of the core technology.

Take a look at some of these numbers. You can see on every one of these benchmarks the total number of TPCCs, or TPCHs, and the dollars per transaction of each kind. Now some of you know these numbers and keep them in your head, and say, well, that one looks good. Let’s just talk about how good they are. Look at the numbers, but now let’s really talk about how good they are. Boom, here is the result. If you take a look at these 4P TPCC benchmarks, we have the record value, the best price performance per transaction of any 4P system in the world. If you go to the 16P systems, we have the best value [transcript edited to correct misstatement]. We now can do over 1 million TPCCs [transcript edited to correct misstatement], which is greater than the number of stock exchange, credit card, and reservation transactions worldwide. Really a phenomenal result. If you go over to the decision-support benchmarks, we have record value, and record performance, for small, for medium, for large decision-support systems [transcript edited to correct misstatement] . Everything we’ve done in SQL Server 2005 should take big steps to reminding you, and helping you reinforce with the folks you need to convince, that there is no mission critical enterprise job of any form that you shouldn’t feel confident today running on the Microsoft platform.

I want to have a chance to have Barnes and Noble, a customer for this platform, and these products talk to you a little bit directly about some of their experiences, and hopefully help convince you about why you ought to feel very comfortable moving forward with mission critical applications today with our new product set.

(Video segment.)

STEVE BALLMER: We talked a lot about the enterprise, and in fact we have a lot of folks who have been using our products, Barnes and Noble has, HMV and others, in the enterprise. If you take a look at the broad set of people who use our platform, who use our development tools, it’s really quite extraordinary. We have people in large enterprises, small companies, we have students, and hobbyists, and enthusiasts, we have people who are working on small projects, probably on the Web, we have people who are working on large teams, large organizations, or in independent software vendors, and our goal with this set of releases is to have something for everybody.

So while we talked a lot about the importance of what we’re doing in the enterprise, I want to make sure that the breadth of what we’re doing today is clear to you. In the enterprise we pushed the platform forward, we pushed the development toolset forward with Visual Studio Team System. People who are working on larger products in larger teams over more months really need that kind of a lifecycle development. But, we haven’t, if you will, forgotten the broadest set of developers we serve, which are these Web developers, and students, and enthusiasts, and hobbyists. So today we’re also announcing the new express family of products in our development suite. Visual Studio Express, and SQL Server Express. These are both products that are designed to have the ability to move up, more features, more capability, but come in really targeted at people who are trying to do simpler projects, probably have smaller budgets, I’ll talk a little bit about that in a minute, and allow people to get moving and going very quickly, and very conveniently.

To share with you a little bit of the Express family of products, I’d like to invite on stage with me two people, Brian Goldfarb, who is a product manager for Microsoft Corporation, but more importantly for today, Caroline Holmes, she is a junior at the University of Washington, a student and one of our target customers, please welcome Brian and Caroline. (Applause.)

BRIAN GOLDFARB: Hello, everyone. My name is Brian Goldfarb and I’m a product manager on the Web Platform and Tools team here at Microsoft. And we’re here to show you Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition. A new tool that’s easy to use and easy to learn for building dynamic, data-driven Web sites. Now, it’s different from everything you’ve seen earlier today because it’s laser targeted at hobbyists, enthusiasts, and students. And we’re very fortunate to have with us today, as Steve said, Caroline Holmes, a student at the University of Washington.

CAROLINE HOLMES: I’m Caroline, I’m a junior majoring in computer engineering. We’re going to show you Visual Web developer by building a really cool fan club site for The Windows, which has been our favorite band since 1995.

BRIAN GOLDFARB: That’s right, 1995, a long time coming. So without starting from scratch, we’re going to take advantage of the club Web site starter kit, which we can plug directly into Visual Studio by downloading it. There’s over 20 starter kits available today from Microsoft, our partners, and the community, to give you a jump start on your development.

STEVE BALLMER: What’s the price of those starter kits?

BRIAN GOLDFARB: The starter kits are available for free, Steve.

STEVE BALLMER: Good, I wanted to know, does that fit your budget, Carol?

BRIAN GOLDFARB: Free is good. Free is always good. All we need to do is do new Web site, we can grab the club Web site starter kit, and let’s take a little tour of it to see the core functionality. And it really has everything we need for our site. It’s got a home page, it has an events calendar, it has news, photos, navigation, log-in, you name it. All that core functionality is there. All we need to do to build a fan club site for the Windows is simply customize the kit.

CAROLINE HOLMES: Let’s do that by using the master page template we built earlier today for the Windows. All we have to do is modify the CSS. We didn’t touch the code or the rest of the site at all.

BRIAN GOLDFARB: Exactly, master pages make it very easy to modify the entire look and feel of the site in one simple place. We were able to leverage the Corvis Soft photography that’s included with Visual Web Developer Express, to build some sweet looking images, and a very nice look and feel. So go ahead and do that.

I’m going to copy the default page we built earlier, and let’s go ahead and paste that into the project, overwriting the default master that’s already there. I’ll go ahead and hit refresh, and we’ll see that entirely new look and feel take place. Same site, same functionality, entirely new look and feel from one modification.

Now, most Web sites on the net today are static. Visual Web Developer Express provides us with a great visual design system to modify that static content. I’m going to dive in here, and I’m going to open up the home page and the master page that we just copied in and make some static content changes. First I’m going to change the default text to say, The Windows, and the slogan, of course, has to be Start Me Up. Then I need to remove some of the Lorum Ipsum default text here, and put in the obligatory, we love The Windows, because we are big fans of the Windows. Now that we’ve made the static text changes, I’m going to go ahead back to the browser, hit refresh, and we’ll see those changes applied to our site.

Now, here is where most Web sites stop. What we want to do is take our site to the next level. We want to make it dynamic, we want to make it interactive, we want to give it a feeling of being alive. There are a number of ways that Visual Web Developer Express enables us to do that.

First, I want to go ahead and hook up to some publicly available Web services that The Windows provides for news and event information. To do that I’ll double click on the design surface, and all I need to do is write two lines of code, we’ll say ContentImport.GetFanNews, and ContentImport.GetFanEvents. And those two lines of code when I refresh the page are going to incorporate that data from the Web services into our site. So as you can see here we have our recent news and all the images associated with that, we have our upcoming events, I can even drill into the events calendar now and see the different events listed there, and go in and get the detailed information that’s alive, as our site is updated.

Now, that’s pretty much the core of our site. But there’s a whole lot more we can do. What else?

CAROLINE HOLMES: Well, you know, I have a bunch of Windows memorabilia I’d love to sell on this site, you know, make some money and pay off those college loans. Before there wasn’t really a very reliable way for a student like myself to receive payment for anything that I wanted to sell online. But I was playing around with this earlier, and I noticed that there’s a PayPal enabled e-commerce starter kit that looked pretty easy to use. Do you mind if I give it a shot?

BRIAN GOLDFARB: Absolutely, you drive.

CAROLINE HOLMES: OK. So, I already have all my merchandise in a database, and all I need to do is wire up my site for that database. So, I can drag and drop the shopping list control right onto my design surface for the main page where I want all my merchandise to show up. Then I just need to use the Smart Pass to make a new data source, to point it at an object. Now, the e-commerce kit comes with this very cool thing called a catalogue manager that I can use to manage my catalogue. And it has a lot of great functionality. One of the things it provides is a search function. And all I have to do is tell it what to look for. So, we’ll have it look for the Windows. And that’s pretty much it. So, all we have to do is save, reload, and there’s my merchandise right there ready to be sold with PayPal. (Applause.)

BRIAN GOLDFARB: The starter kits really do give us a great jumping off point for building great, dynamic sites. The PayPal enabled e-commerce kit in particular has everything you need for basic e-commerce transactions, a catalogue manager, a shopping cart, and it all has the PayPal payment gateway built right in.

You know, earlier today I was surfing the Net for everything about the Windows, and I stumbled across this really interesting blog. It was an RSS feed that had the discography information of every release that the Windows have had since 1995. I think it would be really cool if we were able to incorporate that RSS feed into our site so we had a one-stop shop for everything Windows.

CAROLINE HOLMES: I think I can do that. Let’s go back to the design surface. We need a new page. So, we’ll go ahead and say, add new item. We’ll give it the name blog.aspx, and we’re going to tell it to inherit from the master page, so it has the same look as the rest of the site. Now, the great thing about Visual Web Developer is I can make use of pre-built controls into the design surface. So, I will drag and drop my RSS reader control that was pre-built, and the properties right here let me use the functions of that control. I just need to tell it where to find the RSS feed from. And we’re done setting up the RSS. There’s one last thing we need to do, and that’s add our new blog page to the navigation. So, we’ll go down here to the XML fileweb.site map, and you can see it has the URL for all of our other pages, our links, and that kind of thing. And then we can just copy it off one of these lines and update it for our own purposes, blog.aspx was our file, and we’ll give it the name Blog. And we’ll just save our changes, and go back to the page. You can see that the menu is updated. We can click there, and we are now consuming the live RSS feed. And that’s it. (Applause.) Visual Web Developer and the starter kit make it really easy to build a great Web site for the Windows. We were able to make a really good looking site with a lot of dynamic content. There are two things that I absolutely love about this product. Number one is, I can afford it on my student budget, because it’s free. And number two is that I’m working with Visual Studio, and I’m building a great skills that I can use later on for other projects and in my future as a developer. (Applause.)

BRIAN GOLDFARB: That’s right. Give it up for Caroline. (Applause.)

The great thing about Express is that it’s built on the core Visual Studio IDE. So all the projects, all the skills you learn will transfer up to professional products once you’re ready to begin that next stage in your career, or in your development. Thank you, Caroline, for joining us today. We really appreciate it. Thank you, everybody, for your time. Thanks, Steve. (Applause.)

STEVE BALLMER: Well, Caroline was pretty clear about what her budget was as a student, I thought, and while we showed you some of the Web Developer, Visual Studio Web Developer capabilities today, we do want to make sure that you clearly understand the design principle from an economic standpoint of Visual Studio Express, and of SQL Server Express, free downloads available now. (Applause.) We want to make sure that as people enter the profession of programming, whether they’re 10-years-old, or 9-years-old, or 20-years-old, that they can start with our development tools, they can start with the .NET run time, they can start with our IDE, and these tools can keep growing as they get out in the world professionally as they want more capability, et cetera. So, we think it’s a very important addition, not only the Web development capability, is very important not just for the low end, but also it’s for the high end, but we think it’s also very important that we continue to reach out over the Internet to folks who have a more constrained budget as Caroline was describing hers. So, an important step forward.

We showed you a little bit of the new Web development capability that I’m super-excited about in .NET 2.0, and in Visual Studio. This is a big area of investment for us. I told our folks that despite the fact we have some reasonable presence and share in the hosted Web site market, that I really want to go after low end Web hosting and make sure that all of those sites over time get built on with Visual Studio, hosted on .NET, and hosted on the Windows platform. So, we’ve had people really innovated and working in these areas.

Today, independent analysts, and you go up on the Web site, and you see who is saying what, say that Linux today requires 69 percent more administrative time for an e-commerce application than Windows does. That’s an important thing for people to note, 69 percent for an e-commerce Web site. But many of the low end simple Web sites are even simpler than that, so we’ve really put a lot of time and attention into this next generation platform in making sure that we absolutely have the best value no matter what kind of Web site you’re building. We had a chance to hear from Brian about some of the free customer value that’s available whether it’s the sample Web sites that you saw, things for blogging, for photos, image gallery, et cetera, to try to enhance the total value. When you take a look at what we’ve done with Windows Server 2003, and SP 1, we’ve improved scale, we’ve improved management. The hosters are telling us today that the cost of hosting shared Web sites on Windows is now essentially at parity with Linux. You’ll certainly hear that from Go Daddy, and from a variety of other hosters. And, in fact, today 50 hosters are announcing their support for this next generation platform, Windows Server 2003, SQL Server, and Visual Studio. So, at no time have people doing either complex or simple Web sites had better development tools, or better economics in terms of using our platform and we expect to see Windows continue to build share, not only on high end, complicated Web site, but for lower end sites, shared hosting, et cetera, with the innovation in this next generation product set. And when people first start, there’s no place better to start than Visual Studio Web Developer, an important advance for us.

I want to turn now to the variety of partners who are supporting Visual Studio 2005, SQL 2005 and BizTalk, and we have a range of partners. Paul Otellini had a chance to talk about some of the hardware partners who are supporting us. We have over 200 VSIP partners announced today with over 800 products that fit into the Visual Studio IDE and can add productivity to your experience as developers, so that you get faster results in the work that you do with this product line. You see here a list, some of the many companies who are embracing and supporting these new products.

We have a number of what we call platinum partners for the launch that we thought we would give them a chance to speak to you directly. So if we could roll the video, please, let’s hear why some of these partners are super-excited about the new products.

(Video segment.)

STEVE BALLMER: Before I wrap up I want to give just a little bit of attention to some of the things that we’re trying to do here, post-launch, especially for those of you who were kind enough to take the time and spend it with us at these launch events. We have complimentary products for everybody attending a launch event. We say thank you for coming. We have a complimentary certification for people who are coming to these launch events, to try to get you bootstrapped to show your credentials with the new technology. We have an offer that’s broadly available, 50 percent off for people who can get customers to migrate from a competitive database, for example, Oracle, for the first year. There are a footnotes around that, but we wish you well with that endeavor.

Last, but certainly not least, we encourage you all to get the free downloads of Visual Studio Express, and SQL Server Express for a wide variety of people in your organizations. We encourage you to register, if you register your download then you also get what we call the do it yourself kit, which includes much of what Caroline and Brian had a chance to show you, including 100 of the most popular user controls, professional icons, and a bunch of images from the Corvis Image library. So a set of things that hopefully help you get out of the chute and going with this new set of products very, very quickly.

I hope at this stage you get a little bit of a sense of where we’re coming from, and why we’re excited about the new releases. A new application platform, a platform whose whole is bigger than the sum of its parts. A platform that will support you, as you try to help the users you serve get better decisions made and get faster results, a platform that I think has proved itself with customers, in terms of its trustworthiness, that is very scalable, that supports really very, very high security operations, and certainly, last but not least, one that is very well supported by software vendors and hardware vendors around the world.

We really are at a critical junction point. The world of IT is only going to get better and more exciting over the next 5-10 years. People are always asking, can the innovation keep coming? Well, the innovation is really going to come from the kind of people in the room right now, the people who build the exciting applications. And our job has got to be to equip you to realize your full potential, for you to make better decisions, for you to get faster results. And when you look at products like Visual Studio 2005, SQL 2005, and BizTalk 2006, I think we’re really giving you a suite of products, whether you’re a student or a high-end enterprise developer, we’re giving you the tools that you need to make better decisions and to get results faster.

We thank you for your time, we thank you for your support. Please enjoy the rest of the launch, it’s been my pleasure. Thank you all.

END