Predictions for Microsoft WPC 2010
Chris Day is the President & CEO of Vancouver's Fully Managed and a Techvibes Guest Contributor. This blog post was published on July 9th on Fully Managed's blog.
We are just about to head out to the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2010 in Washington, DC and I thought I would share a few preemptive thoughts about what we can expect to see this year from Microsoft. Below are a few of my predictions on the event:
The Cloud
We have been following Microsoft's obsession with the cloud closely over the past year. There was little discussion of Microsoft Online Services (Microsoft Business Productivity Suite - a.k.a. BPOS) or Azure at last year's event - it was all about Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. This year, we expect that "The Cloud" phrase will be beaten to death. We know that Microsoft is heavily invested from an R&D perspective this fiscal year (which started July 1st) and we expect that to be made loud and clear in the messaging across the board. With BPOS now in full production for over a year, we expect to see a lot more talk on Microsoft's other key cloud offerings including Microsoft CRM Online, Azure & Windows InTune. We expect to see some coordination between these platforms from a roadmap perspective and hopefully some centralization from a management perspective.
Social Media
Last year's Twitter stream was fairly weak - this year, with Twitter seeing nearly 100% growth from last year we expect that the #WPC10 hashtag will be beaten up and fun to follow. Microsoft is also aggregating blogs and multimedia content on it's Digital WPC social page - we expect this to be pretty jammed too. The Fully Managed™ team will be running at full tilt from a social media perspective - we'll highlight interesting announcements, technologies and even the social scene. Last year we had a lot of interest in some of the "non-technical" content we collected out on the mean streets of New Orleans.
Steve Ballmer & Bill Clinton
Will Steve Ballmer's head finally explode during his fiery keynote speech? We think it's amazing it's managed to stay on so far - I'm sure we'll see Steve as passionate as ever about the Cloud and we look forward to experiencing it first hand. More exciting than Steve, however, will be the keynote speech to be delivered on Wednesday by none other than Bill Clinton. We are all thrilled to see what Bill has to say - he's a great speaker and I'm certain the topic will be gripping.
As we head out on the road to WPC, I'd like to thank our Vancouver, BC-based clients for their ongoing support and our team back at headquarters who'll be steering the ship while we're learning about Microsoft's vision for 2011.
