Thoughts on the Microsoft Hosting Summit from Hosting.com
Sometimes it makes sense to measure the success of an event, such as Microsoft's Hosting Summit, on the number of sessions that are you are UNABLE to attend. While I was able to be in many of the sessions this year, this was most certainly the case for me at this year's event. The message was so loud and clear that it engaged me in meetings and conversation throughout. What was the message that I heard? Microsoft continues to drive towards their cloud strategy at full speed and the new product suites coming from the product groups are listening to the feedback of hosters like never before.
Over the past year Hosting.com has been very focused on working with our strategic partners, including Microsoft, with the continual development of our self-service managed cloud. An example of this is the aggressive adoption rate of Windows 2008 R2 within our public cloud, where almost 70% of our new cloud clients are utilizing that technology. We continue to hear from our clients that we need to provide a self-service portal where resources, as well as managed software and services can be dialing up or down on demand. Microsoft has been busy listening to those same requests from their hosting partners and developing their products around that model. So what I did I see this year?
SharePoint 2010 will have great use cases for the hosting community, including a renewed focus on the internet sites concept. For those of you not familiar, this will provide the hosting community the ability to offer scalable web facing sites without limiting select features as in the past. By executing on key improvements including developing a feature rich SDK, adding more automation to the PowerShell architecture controlling the backend, and offering quality of service alerting-like features for the administrators, I foresee by the Summit next year we will have some hosting organizations delivering unique customer experiences across the industry.
Matt Ferrari
Director of Platform Engineer