@ Microsoft WPC

I am currently attending the Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference in Los Angeles and thought I wanted to share a few impressions from the conference so far.

I was invited by Microsoft as part of ScanJour to attend the conference including a pre-conference day on Sunday – the “partnering executive summit” – for a selected number of around 200 partners (the conference has around 15000 participants in total).

In terms of our R&D and the tools we use at ScanJour we are fully embracing the Microsoft stack using Visual Studio TFS including the integrated test- and lab management parts of TFS. In fact we are deploying perhaps the largest setup of the Lab Management module of TFS in Europe. As such in our internal use we are far ahead in relation to topics such as virtualization and hosting of our R&D environments. Together with Microsoft we are currently thinking about how we can extend the use of Microsoft’s technology stack to including more of Sharepoint and SQL server.

Business Intellligence
During sessions Sunday and as part of Satya Nadella’s keynote Tuesday, Microsoft demoed among other things a very interesting new project codenamed Crescent, which is going to be part of the new version of SQL Server (codenamed Denali). This was an end-user BI tool running with a Sharepoint client UI. It was extremely simple and fast to create very compelling dynamical reports and graphs directly in Sharepoint. Imaging the tool as a sort of mix between creating a Powerpoint slide and a Pivot graph chart directly inside Sharepoint – but with dynamic drill-down capabilities - pretty cool! And it could include data from all kinds of datasources. Microsoft also showed an existing add-on to Excel called Powerpivot which was super cool. The guy on stage had an excel sheet with 62 mill. rows (!) which he sorted with the same speed as it had only be a few hundred rows.

It looks like Microsoft has a good chance of conquering significant part of the BI space with a focus on simplicity and performance. This seems to be a good match for a company like ScanJour with some very data-heavy solutions which can benefit from a sophisticated BI solution on top.

Lync (communications platform)
Lync was demoed (the new unified communications platform) and Microsofts strategy in this area seems very compelling. Basically people should be reachable both within an enterprise and outside on whatever device. For those skeptics this is much more than Messenger/Communicator. On main stage they demoed a few super cool scenarios with Lync video conversations going across the PC, Windows Phone as well as Xbox! . Pending regulatory approval of the Skype acquisition this would also extend to Skype users. The one IM conversation actually was happening with Bing translation on the fly from English to Spanish via a Lync add-in. Super cool.

Windows Phone
My person opinion is that Windows Phone has the potential to be very big. The new version codenamed “Mango” was demonstrated and Microsoft showed some very compelling scenarios. The speed of the UI was impressive and better than any of the competitors (Android, Iphone) and the level of integration in the UI of 3rd party apps, Bing search and others, was amazing and completely blended in seamlessly. The only thing lacking comparing to my own IPhone seems to be the selection of relevant apps on the Windows Phone Marketplace – If I could bring my favorite apps with me from my Iphone when Nokia (hopefully) soon builds and ships a high-quality phone I’m on Windows Phone. The user experience seems much better and fresher than that of IPhone.

Cloud
One thing which is prevalent on this conference is the enormous focus on Cloud. There is no doubt that Microsoft really is all-in with regards to moving all of their stuff to the cloud. This is very very big business. I would say that more than 80% of all topics on this conference have a relation to Cloud and/or Windows Azure. Tony Scott (Microsoft CIO) gave a few examples of internal use of cloud solutions, one being Microsoft’s own e-mail. As he put it, today Microsoft IT no longer runs their own exchange e-mail servers – this is all moved to the cloud (a.k.a. Office 365) exactly the same way all companies can choose to run e-mail as a cloud service from MS. Pretty impressive. Tony Scott also talked a lot about the benefits of a cloud service in relation to high scalability at peak periods. For instance an internal HR performance management solution they use, where 90.000 employees typically access this tool twice a year during a day or two.

All in all an interesting conference so far with a lot of relevant content. As an independent ISV it’s comforting to hear about the focus and sincere wish Microsoft has to create new opportunities together.