Day 3 at the 2009 Microsoft World Partner Conference

After three good days of meetings and sessions at the 2009 Microsoft World Partner Conference, I CAN definitely affirm that it is my favourite Microsoft event.

The drive and variety of the global Microsoft partner ecosystem give me the energy for the rest of the year and help clarify the direction that we envision as business deciders.

This year, more than ever, I feel that the upcoming Microsoft stack has reached a maturity that will continue to bring a lot of tracking in the enterprise and SMB markets. SharePoint 2010 looks astoundingly powerful in combination with Office 2010, especially in multi-user document editing and merges. This basically means that you will be able to work in team on your latest PowerPoint presentations or Excel spreadsheets. I’m looking forward to see the capabilities of SharePoint 2010, which seems to have lost its "O" in its name (MSS 2010?). Well, Microsoft managed to vary the name in every version of the product...

Search and FAST Technologies will also bring enterprise and Internet search to a new level in an already very popular platform (SharePoint). I believe that SharePoint future is even more golden that it is today. Expect very impressive market traction with these solutions.

Windows 2008 R2 with Hyper V brings the cost down on virtualization while getting really close to VMWare in terms of capacity, even as allowing you to manage physical and virtual machines all in one package (which VMware does not support).

Windows 7 is going to fill the blank left by Windows Vista with its very stable base. The industry has already recognized Windows 7 as a really good upgrade to Windows XP for enterprises (Windows 7 boots an XP compatible mode in case you have to run your application under an XP native mode).

Silverlight 3.0, with its ever-growing number of RIA applications, Expression 3.0, Windows Azure and cloud based computing, which is going to support other technologies like Ruby, PHP or Java. All these technologies and services will strengthen and help position Microsoft adequately in the ever-changing industry of deployment and hosting of applications brought by cloud computing. This will also help grow the presence of the Microsoft Web Platform in the Internet ecosystem.

All of the products mentioned previously are a fraction of what they are putting on the market, but two elements that I have retain so far is Quality and Maturity. They systematically continue to increase and get better with each version of their products and the polished aspects of the solutions are obvious. Having been in contact with the Microsoft ecosystem of solutions for more than 12 years, I really feel that this wave of products (mainly 2008 R2s and 2009s) will help bring more value than ever to the partners deploying solutions to customer.

Finally, talking about partners, Microsoft is changing its Partner Program to Microsoft Partner Network. The typical Certified and Gold Certified appellations that we have been used to are going away. Partners are going to be qualified more vertically with a larger number of competencies. Partners will also be encouraged to enrol in the Partner Service Ready offerings with Microsoft Consulting Services to get lead engagements. Time will tell what these changes will have on the way we do business and engage with customers, but one obvious change that I foresee is the greater specialization of each partner.

That being said, there are still one more day to go, and I really feel that this event is always well invested time and money and rich in business opportunities. Oh and by the way, next year's WPC2010 will be held in Washington, D.C.

See you there.