11 Jan 2010, 8:55 pm
HP, Microsoft and the Future of IT
Corporate Vice President, Management And Services Division
Today Microsoft and HP announced some great news for customers and partners of our infrastructure software and server applications: a $250 million engineering, sales and services partnership to advance cloud computing and help customers better use IT for business success. You can read the press release and watch videos of executives commenting on the agreement here.
This is a broad, far-reaching agreement with a range of components, building on our 25-year partnership with HP and ongoing efforts to deliver what we call Dynamic IT. As one of the main architects of the agreement, I wanted to provide some insights about what it means for customers and partners.
This is clearly a big commitment on our part. Overall, our intent is to deliver no less than a next-generation computing platform. The goal is to lead the adoption of cloud computing while helping companies realize immediate business benefits through IT. With this partnership the two companies are working toward new models for application delivery, hardware architecture and IT operations.
Together HP and Microsoft will deliver a deeply integrated IT stack for business applications. We are driving architectural innovation that connects IT infrastructure to applications for better performance, reliability and availability of the industry’s top business applications with push-button simplicity – all at a lower cost of ownership than ever before.
For example, pre-integrated hardware, software and application solutions, based on HP Converged Infrastructure and optimized for Microsoft Exchange 2010, will help customers boost employee productivity and protect sensitive information at a lower cost per mailbox.
Key to this deal is integrating virtualization and systems management across heterogeneous datacenter and cloud environments. Seamless management for both physical and virtualized systems will provide automatic provisioning, power management and self-tuning, which together will help customers streamline the deployment of new business capabilities across their companies.
For example, we’re integrating HP’s Insight Software and Business Technology Optimization software portfolio with Microsoft’s System Center suite. That will enable customers to uniformly manage virtualized IT services in mixed datacenter environments, which will dramatically simplify management for administrators and increases their contribution to the business.
We’re excited about our joint engineering roadmap and commitment to innovation for both today and the future. I feel strongly that this partnership will give customers the confidence to deploy new business solutions using IT they already have in place, and take advantage of the new world of private and public cloud resources. Case in point: HP and Microsoft will collaborate on the Windows Azure platform, with HP offering services and Microsoft continuing to invest in HP hardware for Windows Azure infrastructure.
The partnership also entails big investments in HP Technology Services and Microsoft Services to provide design, implementation and support for our joint technologies. And we are increasing our joint investment in our HP/Microsoft Frontline channel partner network by 10 times, empowering partners to help customers implement and manage the solutions.
This is a big day for Microsoft and HP. More importantly, it represents the beginning of a new period of opportunity and possibilities for customers and partners worldwide.
The post HP, Microsoft and the Future of IT appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
11 Jan 2010, 12:21 pm
Driving Better Retail Business Intelligence
Worldwide Lead Strategist, Business Intelligence And Co-Author Of Drive Business Performance
The economic crisis has reminded business leaders that developing a great strategy is not enough. They need to execute that strategy within an organization that empowers them to make the right decisions, better and faster. Doing so requires systems that can adjust to market conditions. But most importantly, it requires that your organization’s culture is geared for performance.
On Tuesday (January 12) I’ll be talking about Developing a Culture of Performance in Retail at Retail’s Big Show, the annual National Retail Federation Conference. Henrik Amsinck, Lego Group chief information officer and VP, and I will tell Lego’s success story. It is a great story and Henrik embodies the spirit that drives the performance of this amazing company.
Every Lego employee I have talked to shares a strong passion for Lego, their products, and their customers. And we all know some of their customers can be passionate, too. Even over the phone, it’s almost as if I can ”hear” the sparkle in their eyes when they talk about the company. Lego has a strong culture of performance and it shows. In the first half of 2009 the company reported sales gains of more than 20 percent and outpaced the competition. Read a great coverage of Lego’s story published by London’s Daily Telegraph this past December here.
But Lego didn’t always have stellar results. The cultural changes they have gone through allowed them to come back strong and equip themselves to gain market share when others were struggling. How did they do it? And can your organization do the same?
There are three key aspects of Lego’s turnaround we can all learn from:
1) Commitment from the top: As we described in the book I wrote with colleague Joey Fitts, Drive Business Performance, culture changes start at the top. Lego’s leaders showed their employees the value of expecting and respecting data-driven decision-making. Now the entire company is focused on understanding what works, not guessing.
2) Focus on the basics: Too many organizations build processes, reports, and dashboards without asking basic questions about what metrics really drive the business. Lego focuses on a “language of performance” and how the company determines what should be a global standard, versus what should be defined for a particular locale. After stumbling in the 1990s and earlier in this decade, the company also re-focused on core products and core Lego fans. That in turn led to customer loyalty and growth.
3) Compete into the future: Few organizations have implemented the type of information management system Lego has across structured, unstructured, and social data. A core value of Lego’s mission is connection with their customers. However, many of their customers are boys age 6-10. How do you think they connect with them and request their feedback?
Henrik and I will spend more time talking about this great success story. If you are in New York come and join the discussion. You can send me questions in advance at Bruno.aziza@microsoft.com Even if you can’t make it to our session I’d love to hear your stories and thoughts
Hope to see you in New York!
The post Driving Better Retail Business Intelligence appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
10 Jan 2010, 3:19 pm
Today’s kindergartners, tomorrow’s workforce
Vice President for Worldwide Education
Today’s kindergartners will retire around 2075. They will likely look back at 2010 as a quaint time, the way many of us remember the time before VCRs, color television and the Internet. Now is an important time for us to think about their future: What kind of education will be meaningful to them and ensure they can adapt and succeed right up to their retirement?
It’s a question we think about a lot, and something people are talking about at education conferences around the world, including this week’s Learning and Technology World Forum and BETT 2010, two education technology shows in London.
Today’s kindergartners will be growing up in a world where there are tremendous challenges, as well as fantastic opportunities. They’ll need the best education we can give them. But in a world that is changing rapidly – remember, Facebook didn’t even exist eight years ago – what on earth should we teach them?
The question is actually not so much what, but how. We can’t possibly imagine what skills today’s kindergartners will need as they reach the middle of their careers. They will learn in a world that is diverse, globalized, social, and complex. And it will be a world with more information and data than we can possibly imagine. In 2007, computer industry analyst IDC reported that the world produced 281 exabytes of data that year. That’s nearly 30,000 times the holdings of the U.S. Library of Congress. And the growth in information created by humans will only increase – explosively.
But how students learn, and how they learn to use the knowledge they acquire is something that can – and should – be taught. What today’s students need is an education that teaches them to think critically, collaborate effectively, understand technology, and live as a student not only in their specific town or country, but as a student on the entire planet.
Today, teachers, school administrators and education leaders alike are trying to better understand what skills are critical for the future, how to teach them, and perhaps most importantly, how to measure their success at teaching those skills in the classroom. With the right assessments in place, more schools will have an incentive to embrace teaching those skills effectively.
To foster the adoption of more applicable assessment, a year ago we announced an initiative in partnership with Intel and Cisco, as well as other global assessment partners such as the OECD and the IEA. Called the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S – http://www.atc21s.org/home/), the initiative is aimed at helping schools escape an educational model from the 19th century, and adopt one that creates and assesses core curricula based on the needs of today – and tomorrow, so that students are ready for this fast-changing world. You can read a status report about the ATC21S program here (.pdf file, 180kb).
As a first step, more than 60 worldwide researchers and academics created a framework for what skills need to be assessed, and laid the groundwork for how to assess those skills. Specifically, those skills related to ways of thinking, ways of working, and tools for working and living in the world. For the next steps, we will be working with an initial set of countries to pilot ways to assess these skills.
The first skills that we will be looking to assess in schools in our pilot countries of Australia, the United Kingdom, Finland, Singapore, and Portugal are problem solving and digital literacy.
When we’re successful, we’ll change how school s and students are evaluated. Instead of looking solely at math and reading scores to measure performance, teachers, schools, districts and governments will also examine how students are acquiring the skills to succeed in the future.
At Microsoft, we believe that every one of the planet’s 1.4 billion students deserves the best education we can give them. Our participation in the ATC21S program is an example of our efforts to help schools deliver on that belief. Please be sure to read about other ways that we are focused on transforming education over the course of this week, including: our work in connecting colleges and universities; helping youngsters grasp computer programming; and enabling students in impoverished countries to make better use of the scarce PCs available to them.
We’ll be covering different aspects of education this week on the Microsoft News Center and I regularly share my thinking on my Education Insights blog, so if you want to know more, both are worth a read this week.
The post Today’s kindergartners, tomorrow’s workforce appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
8 Jan 2010, 5:53 pm
Happy New Year: Bing Wins Crunchie
Director Microsoft News Center
Here’s a nice way to start off the new year. Our friends over in Bing are celebrating tonight after being honored at this year’s Crunchies as Best New Startup or Product of 2009. A lot of great companies and products were nominated, so the team was excited to even be considered. If you haven’t, check out the list of finalists – it’s a great snapshot of some of the most interesting and groundbreaking companies and applications out on the Web today.
We know the Bing folks have been working hard to better understand what people are trying to do when they search, and it’s great affirmation to know that those of you that voted on the awards think Bing is on the right track. The work they’ve put in to create a true “decision engine” is just beginning, and know they hope to be as successful in 2010 as they were in 2009 finding new and better ways to help connect people with the information they need.
Watch the ustream stream, courtesy of Techcrunch.
The post Happy New Year: Bing Wins Crunchie appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
7 Jan 2010, 3:12 pm
What could be more natural?
Director Microsoft News Center
Earlier this week Steve Ballmer and Robbie Bach delivered the pre-show keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). If you missed it you can watch the entire keynote or view clips.
Steve and Robbie covered lots of interesting ground, but one that is generating a lot of buzz is the announcement that “Project Natal” for Xbox will be available this year. Natal will basically transform your whole body into the Xbox game controller. Seeing is believing.
Natal is part of a bigger effort around what scientists call Natural User Interface (NUI). Steve and Robbie talked about this Wednesday night, and Steve has an interesting post about NUI over on the Huffington Post today. Steve talks about progress in areas such as touch, speech, gestures, handwriting and vision — all with the goal of creating a computer that can see, listen, learn, talk and even understand our intent.
As Steve says, this is an area where we’ve been focused for a while. Some of the fruits of this labor are already in products like Windows 7, Microsoft Surface and Fords SYNC built on Microsoft technology. Others are still a glint in the eye.
If you want to learn more about the potential for NUI, here’s a great interview with Bill Buxton, one of the principal researchers at Microsoft Research.
Bill mentions Windows 7 as a product available right now where touch really comes to life. Here’s more detail on touch in Windows 7 and on some of the hardware and applications taking advantage of these capabilities. I have to admit that I was stunned to see Betty Crocker’s Kitchen Assistant.
Voice is another area of NUI with a ton of potential. Zig Serafin, who leads the speech group here, talks about his vision for speech as an interface in some recent interviews you can watch
For my money, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie showed one of the most intriguing glimpses of the power of more natural interaction during a recent college presentation. In these demos Craig focuses not just on how NUI works, but on the impact that this kind of interaction can have by allowing scientists to manipulate data and see patterns in ways they might not have before. Think about that as you dive into the fun of Xbox and Project Natal later this year.
The post What could be more natural? appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
6 Jan 2010, 5:47 pm
Television of the future isn’t just on your TV
Microsoft TV, Video and Music, Senior Director of Product Management
You don’t need to look very far to see how radically technology has changed the way we do things. Take the area of personal digital entertainment. Just think about how advancements in hardware, software and cloud-based services have drastically changed the way we experience music, take pictures and capture video, connect with family and friends, play video games and more recently watch movies, TV shows and videos. My eight year old wanted a Zune HD for Christmas, and my six year old can whip me at Mario Kart.
The past few years we have seen widespread availability of mainstream television programming online, content previously only available via traditional broadcast distribution. Consumers now have an enormous choice of live, recorded and on-demand TV shows and movies.
The DVR was the first major milestone in putting consumers in control of their TV viewing experiences. We’re now entering a second major change that may have a greater impact on consumer TV viewing than the DVR, and not just for the geeks out there (hey, some of my best friends are geeks). TV will be everywhere and anywhere you want it to be – inside or outside the home, time-shifted, location-shifted or simply viewed from any room in the house via a PC, set-top box, connected TV or gaming console.
Going forward, consumers will be able to enjoy TV experiences that combine traditional TV content with rich entertainment experiences, drawing on content sources from a variety of places including the Internet. Examples could include outtakes, social commentary, behind-the-scenes interviews and much more. Software and cloud services will be the key to unifying and creating these new, more personalized, integrated experiences for the viewer even as the number of hardware devices proliferates. Bringing this vision to life is the mission of the Microsoft’s Mediaroom team.
Consumers want to be able to watch whatever they want, whenever they want, and wherever they want. The challenge of storing and accessing vast sources of content in the ‘cloud’ is something the Microsoft team is focused on solving and we’ve made some good progress (there’s always more work to do!). Our Mediaroom IPTV platform has become the world’s leading IPTV solution, enabling more than 4 million households around the world to access TV content in innovative ways, through operators such as AT&T, British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, SingTel and others.
The release of Microsoft Mediaroom 2.0 that Steve Ballmer announced at CES tonight, will make it easier for consumers to find and discover great content; to watch, listen and engage with TV in new ways; and to do so anywhere and on all the screens of their lives. And, Mediaroom 2.0 will enable pay TV operators to deploy the Mediaroom platform as a single entertainment cloud, extending their premium TV services to reach more subscribers than ever before, across more screens, with more content and more control, anywhere, anytime (even in the bathroom – is there no escape?). And our operator customers can provide all of these consumer benefits without needing to deploy parallel content delivery systems.
Once fully deployed by our operator customers, Mediaroom 2.0 will allow consumers to view live HDTV programming on their PC’s using just their Windows Media Center software – which also provides the ability to watch or record up to four programs at once-. Movies and TV shows recorded on a home DVR will be available anywhere, inside or outside the home. On-demand programming, previously requiring a set-top box, will be available anytime and anywhere as well. Mobile phones won’t be left behind either. Since consumers will be accessing a centralized content system, a pay-per-view movie could be viewed via any connected device, even a smartphone.
A TV revolution is underway, where TV experiences are more personal than ever before. We’re excited to be a part of delivering these new capabilities. Mediaroom will enable operators to deliver – and viewers to enjoy — a seamless television experience with centralized content, DVR anywhere, on-demand features and interactive applications that can flow from screen to screen on any device.
The TV of the future starts today.
The post Television of the future isn’t just on your TV appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
6 Jan 2010, 5:05 am
CES – Optimism About Technology Is More Than Just Fun and Games
Director, Microsoft News Center
For many people Las Vegas is glamorous and exciting year round. No matter what you think of Vegas there is no denying the energy and sense of optimism that permeates the city. There is always something new and usually it’s on a grand scale. Everyone seems to be asking: “Wow, how can we top that? What’s next?”
It seems appropriate, therefore, that the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) descends upon Las Vegas at the start of every year. For the first week of January Las Vegas becomes the capital of “what’s next” for consumer technology and is filled with excitement and optimism about the future of technology. It’s the time of year when everyone’s inner geek can run free, so those of us who are pretty geeky year round will be glued to the news coming out of CES for the next few days.
Our CEO, Steve Ballmer, is famous for being passionate about many things, and the impact of technology is one of them. In a blog post over on the Huffington Post this morning, Steve takes a step back and looks at the broader role that technology plays, and perhaps more importantly conveys his optimism about the role technology can play, in helping to tackle three of the biggest challenges the world faces today: providing affordable healthcare, taking care of the planet, and educating our children.
Steve talks about how moving medical records online can reduce costs, improve quality of care and empower patients. He highlights how new technology can help people manage power consumption at home and on the move. And Steve is particularly passionate about the way technology can transform education and help prepare our children for what Thomas Friedman calls “a lifetime of employability.”
Steve isn’t the only one focused on these issues. Microsoft has teams and individuals working on each of these challenges. Here are a couple of places where you can find out more, and join the discussion:
- Peter Neupert leads the Microsoft Health Solutions Group and his blog digs in further on both the technology and the policy issues surrounding health care.
- Anthony Salcito offers some perspective and analysis on education and the work of his team with his education blog.
- Software Enabled Earth is a blog from our environmental sustainability team.
- And finally, the Microsoft on the Issues blog regularly covers all of these topics.
Steve will be kicking off CES with a keynote speech at 6:30 p.m. PST tonight. Along with Robbie Bach, he’ll be showing off some cool new technology and talking about our vision for where technology is headed. You can watch Steve and Robbie’s keynote live and see all things CES on the Microsoft News Center at www.microsoft.com/ces.
Enjoy the show. For once, what happens in Vegas is unlikely to stay there.
The post CES – Optimism About Technology Is More Than Just Fun and Games appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
6 Jan 2010, 2:00 am
Introducing the Microsoft News Center
Corporate Vice President, Corporate Communications
For the past decade, PressPass has been the official voice of Microsoft to people who are interested in the company. This week, we’re launching a refreshed and renewed version of the site, with a new name (Microsoft News Center) and more content than ever – full details can be found here. As part of the redesign, we are also establishing an official company blog (this one!).
Almost from the inception of blogging, Microsoft has had a large group of passionate and prolific bloggers at the company. Today, nearly all of our major teams have an official blog which serves as the nexus for the conversations that spring up about products, features, issues and news relevant to that group and the audiences who care about it. Because of this, and because of the way we’ve used PressPass, we’ve never established an “official” blog for the company overall.
As we stepped back and started thinking about how PressPass needed to evolve, it became clear that while we now have a great place to put rich media and information about *what* Microsoft and its partners are doing, we also need a place to have conversations about what we *think* and believe, and to offer perspective on what is happening at Microsoft, or in the world of technology more broadly.
In some ways, this makes the blog the opinion section for the News Center, and the place where we’ll likely first post statements and commentary on breaking news about the company. We’ll also use this blog to point to other sites/blogs at Microsoft when they’re more relevant on issues du jour.
You can expect to see a variety of people at Microsoft post to this blog – and each blog will be signed by the person who authored it. Our goal is to start relatively slowly, which means a post or maybe two per day for the next month or so. And like some other company blogs, we are not enabling comments initially, but once we’ve gotten into a rhythm we do hope to enable comments and foster a greater dialogue with readers.
The main place to find news and information will remain the News Center – you’ll be able to see a great example of what we’ll be doing there by checking in on our CES information throughout this week.
I’m sure we’ll evolve the entire News Center site and this blog as we get feedback and see what works and what doesn’t. So welcome, check back, and feel free to give us feedback by sending mail to PressEd@microsoft.com.
The post Introducing the Microsoft News Center appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
