Third Keynote

So this morning's keynote was billed as "Reality of the Cloud", which was all about Microsoft's datacenters. You start to understand the scale of their datacenter operation really when they talk about 'piloting' a technology on 1,000 servers, and growth doubling from 10,000 to 20,000 server installations per month. The speaker was refreshingly honest and talked about recently starting to use the latest MS products to manage their environment as previous versions just didn't cut it.

It was also interesting to see the term 'Operation Excellence' in use, as well as her departmental key drivers being very similar to some of our principles (growth, efficiency and trust). I'm not sure MS are big on mutuality just yet though! Probably the most interesting thing she talked about was the impact on MS when acquiring companies, as they are often open-source, niche technology companies that are highly heterogenous. This has directly led to the interoperability features in the recent products.

In short an engaging keynote that drove home the scalability of the MS management products and an insight into the infrastructure that sits behind the scenes of services like hotmail and MSN.