Take-Aways

This week I'm in Redmond, Washington at the Microsoft CIO Summit on the Microsoft campus. Last night I started to think about things I learned during the first day of the summit and just how much information was presented. The first day had informational sessions from 7:30 AM until about 5:45 PM so it was a ton of speakers, slides, and demo's. I'm starting to think now in terms of high-level take-aways that I can use in the future to move our business forward. Here's a few:

• Hosted Services - Microsoft is moving into SaaS big-time. However, they seem really committed to allowing customers to make a choice between on-site or hosted. I talked to a lot of peers here that, like me, were really impressed by their Hosted Exchange Service. Really cool stuff.
• Business Intelligence - I heard some good confirmation that we're heading in the right direction with our BI efforts. We've got a lot of work still to do and I'm looking forward to integrating better with our other applications and finding more value for our executives.
• Extending Value - We already own a lot of Microsoft "stuff" and we can do a better job of extending the value of those existing investments.
• Virtualization - Microsoft is pretty late to this market but they seem to be working aggressively to catch-up. And, they aren't ignoring VMWare because I saw some of their management tools that manage ESX just as well as HyperV.
• Unified Communications - If our current vendor can't demonstrate a better ability to integrate with Microsoft products we'll have to leave them. At one time, we were on the leading edge. Now we're falling behind.
• Microsoft Infrastructure Optimization Model - I plan to assess the maturity of our own infrastructure and operations when I get back.

More later...