Steve Guggenheimer: Worldwide Partner Conference 2011

Remarks by Steve Guggenheimer, Corporate Vice President, Original Equipment Manufacturer Division
Los Angeles, Calif.
July 12, 2011

STEVE GUGGENHEIMER: Thanks, Andy.

Thank you, everyone. I thought Andy did a great job of sort of teeing this up. The convergence of technologies in terms of chips, radios, memory is leading to a wide range of devices. We’re seeing more form factors, more capabilities, and more choice. All of this then supports your businesses. As we think about driving solutions, there’s a parallel ecosystem on the hardware side trying to bring the innovations and the devices that will complement the work you are doing on solutions.

So, let’s sort of dive right in. Andy talked about Acer, Fujitsu, and ZTE as new phone providers. I’m happy for the first time ever to have one of each of the phones up here and running. All of these are running live “Mango” builds. Acer brings one of the large OEM brands into the phone space on Windows 7. I think this Fujitsu brings a little bit of lightheartedness and life along with a waterproof design. Great capability in terms of the camera. And the ZTE brings one of the largest manufacturers in the phone space into the Windows Phone 7 world. So, as we see the technology move forward in Derek’s great demo, we’re going to have devices that take advantage of it.

Last, but not least, I’m very happy to show, this is the first time, this is the new Samsung that’s coming. It’s very thin, and light, and that’s the theme you’re going to see as the processors get thinner and better battery life, as the screens get better, we’re going to see phenomenal screen resolutions, great battery life, lightweight devices across the phone.

So, the phone has become a great complement to all the solutions you’re doing. You saw the CRM demo. You saw the Lync demo. I would encourage you to go out and start working with them now. Since we spent a good time there, I’m going to move on.

The embedded space is sort of the next, I would say, big opportunity. There’s over a billion processors sold out in the market today. And whether you look at education, whether you look at healthcare, whether you look at things like this arena with digital signage, and point of sale system, Windows Embedded is the largest opportunity in terms of the embedded space today.

So, if I take examples of things you might not think about running Windows today, this is a SonoSite. This is sort of an ultrasound system. You can see the blood flow through here if you wanted to, it’s used obviously for other purposes, but we have the ultrasound system. There are a lot of devices for medical where the fact that you can make devices with no fan now, the fact that you can clean this screen with alcohol, means they’re used in the healthcare system. I actually have an entire hospital room showing drug dispensing, X-ray scanning technology, all of it taking advantage of the embedded platform.

If you take this arena, right, about 80 percent of the point of sale systems around the world use Windows or Windows Embedded. Those systems can be handheld systems. They can be kiosks or registers. Those feed into the CRM systems, the type of things that Kirill was showing earlier today, right, all of it on the backend. On the embedded side, digital signage is the other piece. If I go around this arena, the signs that we see everywhere now that are electronic and digital, those all run Windows Embedded software.

I was driving down Olympic Boulevard yesterday, there was this beautiful billboard, and it was digital. That’s running a Windows Embedded or a Windows PC operating system on the backend. If you go to China, the largest electric network in the world, how do they check every node in the entire power grid? They use a Windows Embedded server in each one. So, the opportunity to take your solutions and build customized devices. Here is a scanning device. You know, these types of devices have bee built for rugged use outdoors. This one I can take it swimming if I wanted to. If for whatever reason you’re working outdoors, and working sort of in an environment that needs it, you can get it. So, handheld scanners, again, Windows Embedded in that particular area.

Tami yesterday talked about Ford, and how they’re rolling out, I can’t remember if it was 70,000 or 80,000 Windows 7 PCs. They rolled out three million cars using the Windows Embedded technology in their SYNC system. And there are other auto manufacturers there.

So, home care is another area. It just goes on and on. As you think about your solution, there are opportunities now working with ODMs and OEMs to build specific hardware to map to your solution, whether it’s in any one of the verticals I discussed, or ones that you work in. Please come and see the booth, and we can talk more about what we can do with Windows Embedded.

Now, the PC side of the house is bread and butter for many of us. It’s sort of the front end. Tami talked about 400 million Windows 7 PCs. There are several categories, and I wanted to spend some time on what’s coming out for this holiday, and what we have to work with to sell those couple of hundred million PCs between now and “Windows 8.”

Now, on the commercial side of the house, commercial PCs are generally defined by a longer warranty. They have a three-year warranty, which means they’re more ruggedized. The hard drives typically have some shock resistance around the outside of it. They have a harder case to them. Typically they might have a docking station. They’re also defined by security. When you put a machine like this into a corporate environment, people want a TPM chip, or they want some type of hardware security to go along with the software security. So, all the machines you see up here, the Dell, the HP, the Lenovo, the Sony, the Acer, the Toshiba, et cetera, these are all corporate machines. And one of the things Windows provides is both choice and value in terms of all of these.

This Panasonic is a Toughbook; you can drop this thing off of a tank if you wanted to. They use them in police cars. Again, you know, optimized for a specific solution.

The Lenovo here is not on, so I’m going to take it from cold boot, and I’m going to turn it on. One of the things that Lenovo has been focused on is that cold boot capability. The opportunity to go completely off to completely on in under about 20 seconds. And the nice thing about that is, it’s a very quick boot PC, but they’re also willing to customize. They’re willing to work withy you and your customers to take the image that a corporation would have, and work with them to tailor it so that it also does a quick boot. So, for example, if you have a solution you want to build, the partners that we work with are getting better at customizing the PC load itself to create a very rapid experience, whether it’s coming out of hibernate, or booting from cold like that machine.

Now, there are some other fun things. Lots of people want more screen real estate. One way to do that is to just be clever. The Onkyo folks had some fun with that. I enjoy that one a lot. We’ll put that one back. But another technology that people are working on is trying to get the edges down on the bezel. You’ll notice how this is a very thin edge on the side. Back to the innovation point, right, what’s happening now is we get to this type of technology; you basically get a 14-inch screen from a 13-inch screen, because you no longer have thick edges around the outside. So, that’s another area where we’re getting more screen real estate over time.

Let’s slide over a little bit. This Toshiba here, it’s connected up to servers. Server is another area where the hardware space is innovating. We have home servers here. We have small business servers. I didn’t bring one with me out here, but in our booth we have a multipoint server. A multipoint server is a machine built specifically for education. It connects to 25 monitors, keyboards and mice, and you can run them all from one machine without needing any other hardware for those systems. And, LG has a new system where the keyboard and mice can be wireless. So, when you want to outfit a school classroom  and, in fact, the award winner for the case study on the OEM-side reseller had used some of these systems to outfit as part of a school — that’s a great way to go.

The small business servers now are connecting to Office 365, which we saw in Kurt’s session earlier. And I’m very happy to show this machine off. This is from Western Digital. Western Digital, this is their first entry into the Windows Server storage space as an OEM. So, now we have a small storage server. You can see it is connected to this Toshiba. You can see my screen for managing the system if we want to. And if I wanted to access it remotely, I could go in and do that. This is using an embedded version of our storage server. With the right setup, I can actually hot remove a drive, and I can actually plug it back in with no software work required, manual, and it will rebuild. You’ll see it says storage degraded, and it will sit here and rebuild over the next couple of hours. So, Western Digital announcing for the first time this offering here at the show, a great offering, a great set of hardware and software together in terms of complimenting the commercial solutions for small business.

Let’s slide on over and start easing our way into the consumer side. When we think about commercial and we think about consumer, there’s a lot of discussion on slates or tablets. Tablets have been around for quite a while. There are many form factors that allow us to be what’s called convertible, right. I can take the screen, I can rotate it over and I can flip it down. And if you think about wanting to use ink for part of the time and wanting to use a keyboard and mouse for part of the time, it’s a perfect solution.

The nice thing about all these systems, they can come with the TPM chip for security. They support all the existing applications you have today. They support the management infrastructure. They work within the corporate environment.

Now, if we want to get towards more of a specific slate form factor, where there is no attached keyboard, there are several choices here. Let me log into this machine. This is a motion system. This is built specifically retail. It’s a Windows PC. It takes advantage of the pen. It takes advantage of touch. It also has a built-in barcode scanner. So, I have a scan code on this particular sheet of paper. I’m going to go ahead and scan it, and it pops up that I’m going to buy a Microsoft H2C 121. We see the total here. I could click on it. I could go through and pay cash for this. I could have the customer sign, right. And this takes full advantage of the CRM system.

I went into the Microsoft Store this week and I had to buy a router. I came down to LA. My folks live down here. Guess what I get to do after I’m done here at the show? I get to go play Mr. IT Pro. At any rate, one of the things the person at the sales desk said was, hey, would you like me to print your receipt or just email it to you? I said, email it. They emailed it to me before I got out the door on my Windows Phone 7, I could see the receipt there already, so really nice integration between the hardware and software, very good specific build solutions, again, as the partners begin to innovate.

Now, earlier the DJ has been showing off this ASUS 121 slate. I understand. So, this has the best of everything. It’s built on a core processor. It does the best of inking. It does the best of touch. Plays all the media you could want. It runs at the full performance and has all the ports.

The difference between the one he’s using on the DJ system and this one is this is the new B121. The one complaint we’ve had so far is no TPM chip. So, as Mr. Ballmer, who is the No. 1 user of this device in our company knows, he gets a lot of grief from the IT department for bringing a machine in that we can’t sort of lock down the way we want.

So, now I’m happy to announce here at the Partner Conference that ASUS is building the next generation, the B121 with the TPM chip built in. So, now this is ready for commercial. You can take these. You can customize and build solutions, again, all your manageability, all of your software, all of your compatibility all works and you get the full benefit now of making it work in the corporate environment.

As we switch over to consumer, there’s a lot of fun things you can do in terms of convertible form factors. This is the new Acer, the W500; I can just sort of pull the keyboard off if I want to work. Here’s an app that’s written to take advantage of touch, kind of a nice comic book fun app. So here I’m, again, taking advantage of that hardware innovation, blending really innovative hardware and software together, in this case to go back and forth between sort of having the keyboard and not having the keyboard. I have a couple of other options up here; the Fujitsu comes with a TPM built in and MSI.

Now, as we look at consumer laptops, and we sort of head into the consumer space, obviously there’s more choice, typically more color over here, price points are a little different, as we’re not shooting for a three-year warrantee. There’s a number of these devices that show off a broad set of innovations. I’m going to slide towards my left. I think the hottest thing for this holiday season is going to be thin and light. I talked about it on the phone. On the PC side, let me take this, this is the new VAIO Z. They haven’t shown this yet.

Tomorrow they’ll announce this device here in the U.S. It’s a beautiful  it’s probably less than two pounds, lightweight. Does about seven hours of battery life, sort of without an attachment, but now we have these extra flat batteries that you can add on. So, this device will go to 13 hours of battery life, right, with a flat battery, super-thin, beautiful screen. So, we’re getting to a design point where it’s just phenomenal what you’ll be able to do this holiday.

Now, I’m going to go one step further. I’m going to slide down. I’ve got two here. This is an ASUS one that I showed off at COMPUTEX. It’s not available yet. And this is the Samsung, right. You take these two. We’ll see if we can get an edge. You can just see how thin these guys are, right. You can do a little round of applause for these. These are beautiful. (Applause.)

These machines, performance-wise, latest CPU, latest graphics capability, right, they have all the ports, everything you would want in terms of your compatibility. The Samsung is starting to come with a TPM chip, so it can be used in a corporate environment. These devices have a backlit keyboard. You give me any thin, lightweight laptop device; we’ll take it head to head. So, the Windows ecosystem is continuing to innovate. This device won PC best of class, right. So, you’re seeing a lot of innovation in the area around thin and light.

As we slide down, you know, the PC is a hub for innovation. Here’s a full 3-D system. Here’s an HP Envy, which takes advantage of Beats technology. I brought this one along. This is a Toshiba system. It’s using a Llano processor, a new AMD processor. They’re reasonably low cost. One of the things we’ve done with this particular machine is we’ve taken it and we’ve hooked it up to a Kinect sensor. So, there’s an SDK for Kinect out there. So, I have virtual  what I have out here is the worldwide telescope, and you see how the planet is moving, as I move my hand around I can rotate the planet. If I bring the planet in I can sort of zoom in a little bit. Let me come back around.

So, we’ll try it one more time. We’re on the dark side of the planet, so I suppose we should flip around here. There we go, come around to the daylight, all right. We can shrink it back down. Now, this is, again, a research tool. Our researchers are starting to take the power of Kinect, which is a great piece of innovation, right, the power of a standard laptop PC, and the worldwide telescope, one of the richest databases in the world, and put them together.

And that’s sort of a nice demonstration of how the PC provides that innovative platform. Let’s take that a step further and talk about one of the hottest areas in terms of innovation, which has been the all in one. Take your standard desktop or laptop hardware, mix it with a beautiful screen, right, and some great software, and you see a number. This is the mosaic app you saw on the video yesterday, right.

Here I have the HP TouchSmart. This is sort of the best of the best, in terms of bringing all the pieces together. First off, they’ve got a great innovative design. So, if I want to work in this environment I can. So, I’ve got it laid down so I can read, because here I have a USA Today app. Has that same Beats audio. It will play Blu-ray DVD. You can have a tuner card with it. It’s got touch support built in. I don’t have to have some little add-in on the side that only does zooming around.

If I click on USA Today, I’m going to go to sports, right. If I pull up the day in sports and look at the photos, Homerun Derby last night, you can see as I scan through the world of sports, so really a nice mixture of hardware and software coming together.

You saw the Boeing demonstration earlier. This type of capability is now available today. And these machines are just as hot as can be. Here’s the Billboard app, same type of thing. I can go into the Hot 100. I can scan around and look at all the music. And the last machines are a few game machines. Gaming really brings the best of the hardware and software together, right. All of the hottest, latest games are built on the PC, and they actually are sold on the PC.

So, we’ve covered a lot of ground. My overall point is, as we look across the world of Windows, and the Windows ecosystem, there is more and more hardware to support your solutions, right. We have the opportunity together to take advantage of a billion embedded processors, hundreds of millions of smartphones, over 300 million PCs next year, and continue to build very, very rich, scaleable solutions, right.

As you go to market, as you look at your opportunities, we’d love to help connect you with the hardware partners that are building these machines, 70 percent of these machines are going through resellers today. So, it’s not like they’re selling them somewhere else. They’re working with you to sell these solutions, right. All of the development you’ve seen over the last two days, Tami’s discussion of Windows 8, you can be assured we’re working with the hardware partners to make sure we have a pipeline of new devices coming.

Today we showed the Sony for the first time, the ASUS for the first time, the three new phones for the first time, the Western Digital for the first time. The pace of innovation continues to drive forward. So, as you think about the world of Windows, we want to help provide you with opportunity by bringing the best of hardware to support the best of your solutions, and we look forward to working with you in the years to come. Thank you for your time.

(Applause.)

STEVE CLAYTON: Thanks, Guggs. An unbelievable set of devices, as always, and you can head over to the Solution Innovation Center and check out, get your hands on all of that hardware. We also brought the cloud to LA this morning in a big, big way. All of our sessions have a cloud element. So, I’m looking forward to seeing each of those sessions this afternoon. We’re going to weave the cloud in everywhere.

So, I’ve got a bunch of things I want to run through as people are beginning to get ready to go and grab some lunch. I also wanted to hit on something that Satya mentioned earlier. He talked about the Windows Azure Marketplace. We now have 600 commercial applications and datasets in that marketplace. It’s a terrific opportunity for you to really connect with how can you go and make money and transact around Azure.

WPC Connect, another opportunity to connect, sold out yesterday. We’ve added a whole set of more tables into WPC Connect today. So, again, head over to Solution Innovation Center, connect with your partners, it’s all about partner networking.

This evening we’ve got over 30 regional roundtables and parties. I’ll be showing up at some of them. There’s a whole set of them around LA this evening. What else do we have on? Tomorrow, Jon is back, Kevin Turner is back, and Kevin Turner is coming down to see us, our chief compete officer, and we’ve also, of course, got Sir Richard Branson. We’re taking questions for Sir Richard. Jon is going to be doing a live interview on stage, so we would ask you to send your questions in. We’ve had plenty of people asking of upgrades for their flight on the way home. I don’t need any more of those questions. Send some questions to one of the world’s best business leaders, and you can see them asked live tomorrow on the stage.

So, that wraps up Day Two. Go grab some lunch, enjoy the Solution Value Keynotes, and we’ll see you back here in the STAPLES Center tomorrow morning. Enjoy the show.

END