All the EBS news from Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC)

The Worldwide Partner Conference wrapped up today with 4 days of great info for thousands of Microsoft Partners (mostly VARs & VAPs).  Essential Business Server was demoed and referred to throughout the conference.  For people who weren't able to attend, some of the events were recorded or have web sites.  Here's a quick recap of some of the happenings.

The big news from WPC was that we announced Release Candidate 1 of EBS and demoed it live for the first time publicly.  Several of the talks that included EBS demos were recorded, including:

  • A remote access, management and licensing demo in a talk by Microsoft Vice President Mike Risse (SMB Revenue growth and the product roadmap - Click here, mouse over "Keynotes" and select the SMB revenue growth keynote)
  • A security and reliability demo in a talk by General Manager Larry Orecklin (Transforming IT through the Core Infrastructure Model - - Click here, mouse over "Keynotes" and select the Transforming IT keynote)

In addition, there was a high interest talk on how to choose which product is right for your company - Small Business Server or Essential Business Server.  If you'd like to see this talk, - Click here, mouse over "breakouts" and select the "SMB Server Platform - Which is right for your customer?")

There were plenty of interesting things to see, including the HP C3000 - a blade system sized perfectly for the mid market.  We showed this off in Mike Risse's keynotes and saw a lot of people wearing HP USB Wristbands (where will they think to put a USB key next ;-) ) with the www.EBSandC3000.com URL on it walking around. 

IBM & Intel were present with us in our booth showing the IBM BladeCenter S and Intel Modular Server which are also designed specifically for mid sized companies and provide ideal platforms for EBS.  Dell also showed how well their mini-rack solution with additional EqualLogic storage runs EBS.

Several of the media and roaming video blogging/video sites were there doing interview on all the news, including Joey Snow from Technet Edge who did this short interview with Joel Sider on some of the EBS announcements.

There was a lot more that happened today that will likely go online soon, but I wanted to get this up there so no one was left out of all the recent happenings.

- Eric Watson, Group Program Manager

PS - a couple more news tidbits have hit the web from WPC 

The following video from VarVid is a great interview of the HP C3000 midsize blade system that I talked about in 3 of my keynotes:  https://www.varvid.com/2008/07/the-hp-c3000-an.html

And there is another short interview with me: https://www.varvid.com/2008/07/eric-watson-fro.html

and a number of writes ups in various online news magazines (here's a quick sampling):

eweek https://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Apps/Microsoft-Gears-up-for-Mid-Market-Server-Blitz/

IT Web (TAP customer write up) https://www.itweb.co.za/sections/software/2008/0807030807.asp?A=SBC&S=Servers%20and%20Server-Based%20Computing&O=FPIN

Search Win IT: https://searchwinit.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid1_gci1319958,00.html#