TechEd Keynote this morning

This morning was the keynote from Bob Muglia, Senior Vice President of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft. His speech was "IT Pro Heroes – Changing the World of Information Technology".

Now, I'm not really sure how orange baby rattles play into "Changing the World of Information Technology," but there's one on every seat.

The keynote began with an inane cartoon for Microsoft Communities that was just plain annoying. Nothing to see here. Move along, move along. Then it went into a drum/percussion performance that was, well, interesting. Ah, I see. The big orange baby rattles are maraccas and they want us to play along! Um, no.

Now that that's out of the way, we can get on with the keynote.

Bob Muglia sang praises of the real IT heroes, the folks that manage the IT infrastructure. We saw a clip of how an admin used SharePoint and Groove to match people up after the Katrina disaster.

Next he talked about the state of dynamic IT in the enterprise. He said that 5 years ago Microsoft began a ten year investment to enable the dynamic IT concept. They have made substantial gains in this area and things will change even faster in the next 5 years. I totally agree with him.

There were demos of .Net (wrong group, IMHO), SAAS, Exchange Hosted Services (EHS) and SQL 2008. A good deal of time was spent talking about and demoing virtualization solutions, which proves that Microsoft has a lot invested in these technologies and plans to do a lot more in the future. There was an interesting demo of a new product MS just acquired called Kidaro.

Meh. I've seen much better keynotes.