CLOUD

Today, more than 3,000 European technology professionals are attending Microsoft(R) IT Forum 2003, running 11-14 November. With more than 160 special breakout sessions, more than 40 hands-on labs, and Chalk & Talk sessions, attendees will learn about reducing enterprise costs and complexity with integrated innovation, Windows Server System(TM) and the Dynamic Systems Initiative. In his keynote presentation, Kirill Tatarinov, corporate vice president of the Enterprise Management Division at Microsoft Corp., laid out the company's vision for "integrated innovation," Microsoft's approach to delivering an integrated platform for both Microsoft and heterogeneous environments, thereby allowing enterprise customers to focus on innovation to deliver increased business value. As part of the integrated innovation vision, the Windows Server System provides a complete server infrastructure, enabling IT professionals to lower their total cost of ownership. In addition, with the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), Microsoft is also simplifying and automating the way enterprise customers develop, deploy and operate distributed systems. Microsoft also launched Systems Management Server 2003, a new version of Microsoft's change and configuration management solution offering customers critical patch and application deployment and asset management capabilities, which Tatarinov demonstrated during his keynote address. Also at the show, Kevin McCuistion, director of Exchange Server at Microsoft, highlighted customers deploying Exchange Server 2003. Together with Windows Server(TM) 2003 and Microsoft Office Outlook(R) 2003, Exchange 2003 delivers pervasive productivity to information workers through secure, ubiquitous access to business-critical communications. "Customers tell us their enterprise networks are increasingly complex and IT managers spend most of their time just managing these systems," Tatarinov said. "Integrated innovation is designed to provide products that are even better integrated to ease management and allow IT managers to focus on increasing business value within their organizations."