Bob Muglia (pronounced mug-lee-ah), as opposed to the Italian pronunciation that would sound a lot like the word for “eggplant”, was the speaker. They organizers passed out rattles, showed commercials for Technet.
An aside: In the midst of this pomp I got an email from David Ferris’ news service (see www.ferris.com) which used to be an excellent source of information about messaging products and developments, but which has recently taken a turn towards covering the IT security market – which is bigger and undoubtedly more profitable. One thing about messaging ISVs that make add-ons to Notes and Exchange is that they’re all pretty broke and small and hard to sell to… This I know from experience. Today’s Ferris post was all about some new products that CA had released.
Another thing I’ve noticed about TechEd this year, is that the participants look a lot thinner and healthier than they have in the past. This could be relative, as perhaps I’ve put on a few pounds lately.
The keynote opened with some sort of native dance, a drumming call to action. I was not “feeling it” Perhaps I should have sourced and smoked a doobie before coming to the show. I suddenly understand what the rattle is for.
The drummers are pierced, blond, vaguely polynesian in approach. It’s more like a hippie fair in Eugene, OR and the blond leader of the group reminds me a lot of my chiropractor.
There’s a big stiltwalker. She is dressed up like a character from one of the live action disney shows (It’s about a band) that my oldest son used to watch. Then again, we are near the “House of Mouse”, so it might actually be that character.
OK, enough already. All in all it was not a bad way to wake up.
I may have been hallucinating, but on the big screen that was showing head shots of “heroes”, I’m almost positive that I saw Barack Obama’s face go by on the big monitors while they removed the props from the dance / drum ritual and readied for the keynote. They did some cool things on that video – suffice it to say that there are some people at MSFT that really know how to work Powerpoint.
First Theme – The theme of Bob Muglia’s presentation was “IT Pro Heroes” – given that this entire audience was made up of IT Pro’s, it was probably a safe route to call them all heroes. Major points were:
Microsoft is an enabler (of great things)
IT Pro’s are “unsung heroes”
They showed a video featuring Hunter Ely, a security analyst at LSU. A story was told (against a backdrop of acoustic guitar) about Katrina and how LSU used Groove and SharePoint to track storm victims and their families with relationship to the hospital. A picture of Hunter’s wife and baby were featured. Oddly, they were all barefoot in the picture. Did Annie Liebovitz take the photo?
Hunter came onstage to much applause. He had much less hair than he had in the photograph they had on screen. Hunter, grow it back. You are not in the NBA.
2nd theme – Dynamic IT.
Bob Muglia then talked about how Microsoft, some 5 years ago, introduced the concept of Dynamic IT. technology can change your business lifecycle. Again, I saw some of the nicest Powerpoint slides I’ve ever seen. Kudos to the marketing services team at MSFT.
He went on to discuss that Dynamic IT is a 10 year vision and we’re half way through it. There are 5 more years to go. Muglia pointed out that Microsoft has Infrastructure Optimization models that are available online where you can benchmark your infrastructure. The major point being that moving away from IT being a cost center, to a Dynamic IT that is a part of your business strategy is something that you can buy now.
Some of the subpoints were
Identity Management / Managing Identities. Security and credentials are fundamental and adopting a model of federation is a good thing. Somehow, and I’m not sure how, this was going to allow users to do more self service identity management.
Identity LifeCycle Management with Active Directory and Windows Server 2008 was discussed. Bob Muglia announced that Identity LifeCycle Manager “2” was in beta 3 and available for download.
Fred Delombaerde – program manager gave a demonstration of the new UI for security provisioning. I would like to use that UI to manage SharePoint permissions within our organization today. ILM manager looks like a good thing and the integration with distribution lists and self-serve password reset would be great things to have.
Sidebar: It occurs to me that Bob Muglia sounds a lot like a smarter version of George Bush.
3rd Theme – Interoperability
Bob Muglia talked about how open Microsoft was becoming. An example was given that 50,000 pages of documentation about standards had been produced by the developers at Microsoft. That’s a big number, but a Public Enemy song “Don’t believe the Hype” kept echoing through my head. The presentation got a little vague on some of the points here, but you can’t blame him for trying. I’ve always thought that Microsoft’s idea of standards was to standardize on Microsoft. One concrete example was that SCOM (Systems Center Operations Manager) now works with Linux.
Tags: Add new tag, Ferris Research, General Musings about Technology, Microsoft, MSFT, TechEd, Technology Marketing, Trade Shows
