Here’s the latest news from John Odell, representing Concentrix (with Kevin Whittingham) at the Microsoft World Partner Conference 2010.
Wednesday morning, Washington DC. The Verizon Centre ice arena, home of the Washington Wizards (ice) hockey team and WPC’s big sit-down venue for the week. We kick off with looking at some bleeding edge use of Microsoft’s latest technologies, including:
- Super-computing on-demand through (the) Cloud (GreenButton from InterGrid). This demo showed the rendering of high quality graphics over a complex CAD wireframe by packaging up the “job” and sending it out to a series of clustered servers all running Windows Azure. The workload is spread amongst the various servers and clusters for processing and then returned as a recompiled completed job, doing in a few seconds what would take many hours using traditional means – and all without owning any server hardware. Stunning.
- Silverlight Pivot: Data visualisation, sorry: visualization unlike anything you’ve seen. Awesome.
- Some new camera and projector tech (if you like that sort of thing) from Microsoft's wacky R&D team. These guys are out there, but the technology is out there too and things like projecting an interactive Surface style interface from your phone is not too far away.
Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner (KT) was doing some high octane cheerleading and talking about the competition. KT loves to compete and is the embodiment of Microsoft’s aggressive approach to taking market share. He admitted mistakes, such as dropping the ball on Mobile and the horribleness that was Windows Vista – but was never far away from talking about eviscerating the enemy.
My favourite bit was when, talking about Google, Kevin noted that Microsoft didn’t need anything in their code of conduct saying “don't be evil” to remind them not be evil (see http://investor.google.com/corporate/code-of-conduct.html). Some of things he said about Oracle’s Larry Ellison were just downright nasty, but funny and quite possibly true.
And then it was time for Bill Clinton, 42nd President of the US, philanthropist, philanderer (allegedly) and one of the most gifted speakers of his generation. He was pretty cool. Kevin got a thank you from Bill – it was not clear whether it was directed at our Kev or KT...
We rounded off the morning with a look at another business intelligence software offering (we’re involved in so much BI that I’m going to have to write a report on it...) and a chat with a nice Argentinean lady from Microsoft about the forthcoming changes to Partner status – it’s getting more discerning, so when you see that Concentrix is a Gold Partner specialising in CRM and ERP, you know we’ve earned it!
After lunch it was interactive discussions with some of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM product leaders about Customer Care, an area we specialise in with particular focus on the passenger transport vertical. Some good stuff is coming in Dynamics CRM 2011 and some equally good stuff that we want for our customers is not! They can’t do everything at once, but we’re pushing them and they are listening.
After a few more bits and pieces (including getting some t-shirts – I’m not invoking the idiom of “getting t-shirts” as oft used by our MD, I’m talking about the physical acquisition of apparel) we finished the day with a briefing on the new Microsoft Partner Advisory Council.
We’re packing up tonight as it’s wheels-up as the sun goes down on Thursday. It’s been a full-on, flat-out week and it ain’t over yet... As proof that we were actually here and not sat by a pool in Miami regurgitating Microsoft press releases following a fluke mix-up with the flights:
Kev’s gone native:
Have a nice day – remember you can follow me on Twitter http://twitter.com/odellodell and for lots of other useful stuff, follow http://twitter.com/Concentrix_UK.
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