The global economic climate presents new challenges and opportunities for information technology organizations, Brad Anderson, general manager of the Management and Services Division at Microsoft Corp., told approximately 5,000 attendees gathered at Tech•Ed EMEA 2008, Microsoft’s leading technology show in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for IT professionals.
“IT professionals in Europe and elsewhere are under pressure to reduce costs and help their businesses be more efficient,” Anderson said. “We are working with our partners here and across the globe to give IT organizations one of the lowest costs of ownership in the industry as well as the ability to deliver new capabilities to their business.”
Microsoft’s virtualization solutions, for example, help customers reduce costs through hardware consolidation and the associated electrical power reduction, lower desktop deployment and management costs, and gain deployment and monitoring efficiencies through centralized, policy-based management. In addition, to accommodate the changing, dynamic computing needs across a datacenter, the live migration feature within Windows Server 2008 R2 enables customers to move virtual machines between servers with no downtime or loss of performance.
• One of the many European corporations that has benefited from Microsoft’s IT infrastructure solutions is Banque de Luxembourg, a leading private bank serving investors across the continent. Earlier this year, the bank decided to consolidate two datacenters using virtualization technologies. In these datacenters, which included a total of more than 250 physical servers, the bank ran its most critical line-of-business applications and managed more than 15 terabytes of enterprise data.
• “As a result, we’ve been able to reduce the need for computer hardware, power and cooling, and office space, so we’re now running a more cost-effective, environmentally sound operation,” said Pierre Galteau, system engineer at the bank. “Hyper-V and System Center technologies provide our associates with the resources they need, when and where they need them, for a more flexible and cost-effective IT environment.”
“In these uncertain economic times, it is not surprising to expect businesses to take a long, hard look at their IT budgets,” said Chris Ingle, research director of the European Systems Group at IDC. “However, we’re in the midst of a period when key technology trends are converging, and businesses will need to be more agile in their IT decision-making — not only to reduce costs, but to also take advantage of new technologies and trends that can transform their businesses and deliver new innovations to their customers.”
• Microsoft’s Anderson also noted that many businesses today are looking forward to cloud computing as an important part of the evolving datacenter.
• “We live in a hybrid world of software and services,” Anderson said. “Customers need to choose a path that best aligns with their strengths. Microsoft’s software-plus-services offerings allow businesses to choose, and benefit from both the convenience and security of on-premises software and the efficiency of Web-based services.”
The recently announced Azure Services Platform brings a software-plus-services approach to computing that spans from the cloud to the enterprise datacenter, delivering compelling new experiences across the PC, Web and phone. Developers have the flexibility of choice with Internet scalability to build the next generation of applications. Once written, these applications can then run both in the cloud or on-premises, enabling experiences across a broad range of business and consumer scenarios.-Microsoft
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