Microsoft Customers and Partners Adopt Cloud Solutions to Grow Their Businesses for the Future

ATLANTA, May 16, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Today at Tech*Ed North America 2011, Microsoft Corporate Vice Presidents Robert Wahbe and Jason Zander delivered a keynote that focused on the benefits customers and partners are getting from Microsoft Corp.’s cloud and development platforms. Wahbe showcased how customers HSBC and Travelocity.com LP are using Microsoft’s virtualization and public and private cloud solutions to help reduce costs and speed innovation. In addition, NetApp and Cisco Systems Inc. have joined the growing ranks of partners in the Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track program, designed to streamline the delivery of a private cloud. Zander also announced a key pillar of the next version of Microsoft Visual Studio, the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) technologies that will help organizations ease application development and management.

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Private and Public Cloud: Flexibility to Meet Business Demands

To help ensure HSBC, a worldwide financial services firm, can accommodate shifts in demand for a range of internal systems and also further simplify management of its infrastructure, the company announced it will use Microsoft Hyper-V in combination with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager. HSBC today announced its first project to deploy Microsoft Hyper-V to support Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, which will help reduce the cost of desktop management.

In addition, NetApp and Cisco joined the Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track program, which enables Microsoft and its partners to deliver a broad choice of predefined, validated configurations to accelerate well-managed private cloud deployments. NetApp has teamed with Cisco to develop a private cloud solution, the NetApp Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track with Cisco datacenter architecture.

"By creating a solution with Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track, NetApp with Cisco is simplifying private cloud deployment and operations. Customers will be able to reduce deployment time from days to hours, and they will gain greater utilization," said Phil Brotherton, vice president and general manager of the Microsoft Business Unit at NetApp.

Travelocity, a global online travel agency, showcased how it chose Microsoft's public cloud solution, Windows Azure, to deploy its Java-based critical analytics system to the cloud in just two months.

"At Travelocity, we work hard to understand our customers and make travel a quick and easy experience for them," said Dave Matthews, chief technology officer at Travelocity. "We wanted the same for our transition to cloud computing, and the ability to quickly get new products to market, regardless of the platform, is an important benefit of Windows Azure, allowing us to easily move and deploy a core application to our business."

"Businesses are enthusiastic about the economic advantages that the cloud can provide, and they want to know their existing IT investments will take them into the future," Wahbe said. "Microsoft's unique approach to cloud computing takes this into account, providing customers with the technology and an enhanced business model to run their business across the public or private cloud, or a combination of both."

New Developer Tools Ease Management

As organizations today face increased pressure to build, deliver and run applications across a variety of devices and deployment scenarios, Zander announced Microsoft's vision for ALM in the next version of Visual Studio. Zander described how Microsoft's ALM offering builds on the strong track record of previous Visual Studio releases, and helps improve the flow of information between key stakeholders involved in planning, building and managing applications.

Zander, corporate vice president of Visual Studio, also demonstrated a connector that links Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 to improve the interaction between the development and operations teams. The connector enables an operations team to send application performance monitoring and diagnostic information immediately to the engineering team. Microsoft delivered a community technology preview of the new connector today, available for download at https://connect.microsoft.com/OpsMgr/InvitationUse.aspx?ProgramID=7044&InvitationID=OMVS-QVYH-9D3R.

Organizations interested in taking advantage of the benefits of ALM should today start using Visual Studio 2010 with an MSDN subscription. More information is included on the Visual Studio website, http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio, and on the MSDN website, http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio.

As businesses look to further enable IT efficiency through the deployment of virtualization and cloud solutions, Microsoft also announced the following:

• There are now additional supported hypervisor scenarios for virtualized Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, including Unified Messaging. This combines Exchange's high-availability solutions, Database Availability Groups, with hypervisor-based clustering and failover solutions. Organizations planning to virtualize their Exchange 2010 deployments can get details from The Exchange Team Blog.
• New license mobility options will become available July 1, 2011, through Microsoft Volume Licensing agreements with an active Software Assurance benefit. The new options will provide customers with the flexibility to deploy application services on-premises or through hosted service providers in the cloud. More information is available on the Microsoft Partner Network Volume Licensing website.

More details on the news from Tech*Ed North America 2011, including a fact sheet, are available at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/teched.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

SOURCE Microsoft Corp.