The New Orleans #Microsoft #wpc09 started

Today the Microsoft World Partner Conference in New Orleans started with a good breakfest at the convention center.

After some Microsoft warmpup the session of Allison Watson kicked the conference off. She was followed by Stephen Elop and Bill Veghte. So what's new? Allison launched the new Microsoft Partner Program. Looks like a lot of new tools. On first side there are some nice opportunity's to expand business. I'm afraid though that these tools are not as straight forward as shown. I expect them to be a lot beter and more usefull.

Stephen Elop showed a bit of the products that will be launched shortly and demonstrated some feautures of Office 2010 (we all get an technical preview invitation for it), Microsoft Online products like BPOS and also the SharePoint 2010 platform.
Elop is convinced that 90% of our customers will ask us to help them develop an Software and Services strategy within 12 months. The products are designed to support that, that's for sure.

The part of Bill was about Windows 7. It's not my core interest but it promises to be a hell of a lot better than vista. One partner told the story that he had to down grade customers after delivering Dell hardware to Windows XP. Now so has to be expected not only Windows 7 will be provided with new hardware in the way it used to work, but according to Microsoft also a lot of hardware in the installed based can be upgraded to Windows 7.

Microsoft is aiming on bigger deals in this changing world. They even named a figure of 16% a deal bigger. I wonder on what facts they based this 16%. I understand the opportunity to take advantage of the level of integration of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, the opporunity to add collaboration and communication to propositions. I however can't put numbers to it. We'll see.

9000 visitors on this event from 125 country's. That's about 40% less than last year. Still a lot of people. With 250 of them The Netherlands is the biggest group after the US itself.

Let's collor this event orange! Tonight the dutch partner reception. A lot of business friends are here. Look forward to meet them too.