Monday, August 04, 2008

Australian Partner Conference Arrival

Well, I'm here at the APC '08 and am looking forward to it as well as hoping that there's more *real* content here than there was at the WPC '08. I arrived on Sunday afternoon into a Cairns that was slightly cloudy and 27C - somewhat like Brisbane was on Friday when I spent the day outdoors at Cleveland - lovely Queensland winter weather! :)

I spent a bit of time yesterday talking with Danny Beck, Fred Dennison, Rosemary Stark, Derek Moir and more of the Microsoft guys here at APC '08 and a number of us had dinner last night. Much of the discussion was around MS virtualization which was interesting. I'm not sure that Hyper-V in its current form (a Microsoft Release 1.0 has *never* been all that usable to date) is going to do much of what they'd like to see happen in the marketplace, but I do like most of their longer term thinking (which, of course, involves crushing their competition, which I personally don't think leads to a competitive and healthy IT industry, but we're talking Microsoft here who want to rule the entire planet's IT infrastructure and crush *all* of their competition into historic dust).

The MS Virtualization pre-day session today should be very interesting. I hope to gain a better understanding of where Microsoft sees virtualization going, what they see virtualization can enable and what their total picture of the virtualization marketscape is. I know that virtualization is an important thing to SMBs - the response I received when I asked about this at the last Brisbane SBS User Group proved that - and I hope that through some of the contacts I make here, I can bring this to the attention of Microsoft in my role as the SBSC PAL on behalf of all Australian SBSCs.

If there are any virtualization questions not specifically about SBS 2008 or EBS 2008 virtualization (information about which which will not be released publicly yet) that you have, please email me or reply here and I'll make sure to ask them in the session or after.

Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

No comments: