I’m writing this post, my first post on my first blog, from Tech Ed Europe in Berlin. In between sessions I’m going to try to provide some coverage of this event and present my view on what I’ve heard and seen here.
My visit to Tech Ed is part of the reason why I’ve jumped on the blogging bandwagon – I wanted to let my co-workers know how I’m doing and what I’m doing over here.
This years Tech Ed is all about clouds. I’ll skip all the obvious and not so obvious allusions about Berlin,walls, windows and clouds but I do want to mention that Microsoft seems to be a little late in the cloud game ( as I am in the blogging game perhaps). However,because Microsoft’s ecosystem forms such a substantial part of a lot of services that customers consume, it has an edge on competing unified management systems because it can fully manage this ecosystem and can manage it better.
The System Center suite (which to some extent also seems to include FIM) has been transformed from a vaguely integrated group of management, monitoring and reporting tools into a cloud management quilt where the system center products are the patches and the newly acquired Opalis automation software is the thread.
As I said before Microsoft is late – Vmware has been promoting the idea of a personal clouds for a while now. And great progress has been made to tightly integrate VM’s, Network, Storage and in some cases even OS and software. But where it was lacking was in native support for Microsoft back-end/infrastructure. If Microsoft can take the experiences of the likes of Cisco, NetApp,EMC e.a. with cloud management on the network and storage level(which it has judging from some of the demo’s I’ve seen here) and combine that with its knowledge of managing its own ecosystem no Windows administrator will ever have to leave her or his office to see their clouds but can just look through their windows.
This is the first in a series of posts on Microsoft Tech-Ed, the next posts I will focus on the details regarding System Center and Opalis.
Multiple Choice System Engineer 