MMS 2013: Microsoft Promotes Cloud OS, Touts Customer Success Stories

Microsoft Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson urged an assembled crowd of more than 5,000 system administrators and IT professionals here at MMS 2013 in Las Vegas to embrace the cloud and work to make internal private cloud alternatives as user-friendly as public cloud offerings. Despite some intermittent Internet access at the start of his keynote and a demo glitch or two, Anderson’s message focused on the continued integration of existing Microsoft server and tools products with cloud services, and an ongoing emphasis on making IT more agile and responsive to the needs of business stakeholders and end-users.

Anderson also used the event to underscore Microsoft’s efforts to compete with public cloud service providers and rival visions of the future of enterprise IT, including VMware’s ‘software-defined data center’ push. Microsoft has gathered up a number of products and services under its Cloud OS umbrella, including three key components that Anderson blogged about earlier this year: Windows Azure, System Center 2012, and Windows Server 2012.

The video presentation that opened the 2013 Microsoft Management Summit (MMS)

Anderson also used his keynote address to promote some Microsoft customer success stories, including Microsoft’s recent acquisition of StorSimple (a vendor who helped save the Sundance Film Festival from catastrophic data loss) and news that the Xerox India Development Center used a private cloud along with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server to enhance developer productivity.

A smattering of other product updates and announcements were also mentioned by Microsoft today, including news that public previews of both the System Center Advisor Connector for Operations Manager and Windows Azure Backup were now available, as well as the System Center Management Pack for Windows Azure. Finally, Anderson mentioned Microsoft’s involvement in OpenDaylight, an open source project that intends to promote Software-Defined Networking (SDN).

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