Customer Success Stories and Product Updates Announced at MMS 2013!

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by STB Blogger

Brad Anderson, corporate vice president in Microsoft’s Windows Server and System Center Group, took the stage this morning to kick-off the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas. Anderson’s keynote to more than 5,000 attendees highlighted the company’s Cloud OS strategy and how IT professionals can use Microsoft technologies to transform their datacenters. The keynote, which included live demos, will be available on Channel 9 for on-demand viewing. Anderson also posted to the Official Microsoft Blog today.

Anderson discussed how customers such as Domino’s Pizza, Xerox and Pedcor are using Windows Server Hyper-V and System Center to deliver critical business applications. Read the press release to learn more about how these companies look to Microsoft infrastructure solutions to adapt to the changing needs of their business and customers.  

  • Domino’s Pizza, a pizza delivery pioneer, moved to Windows Server Hyper-V to dramatically reduce downtime of its stores’ point-of-sales application and uses System Center to manage more than 15,000 servers and devices. The company has cut virtualization-related help desk calls by 99 percent.
  • The Xerox India Development Center, which supports software development for customers all over the word, needed to help its developers better collaborate with customers and a more reliable way to quickly test and fix applications. By upgrading to Visual Studio Team Foundation Server and a Microsoft private cloud that dynamically replicates customer datacenter environments, IDC improved developer productivity by approximately 40 percent and cut costs by about 30 percent.  
  • Pedcor Companies, which develops, builds and manages housing communities, needed to improve datacenter availability and give employees in 77 remote offices better access to data and important applications. By replacing VMware infrastructure with a Microsoft private cloud, Pedcor has reduced downtime by 40 percent, saved $560,000 in IT costs and enabled reliable remote access to corporate resources.

Other Highlights Include:

  • System Center Management Pack for Windows Azure is available for public preview today. This management pack enables customers to monitor availability and performance of their Windows Azure resources and services using their existing System Center 2012 SP1 monitoring environment.
  • A public preview of the System Center Advisor Connector for Operations Manager is available as a free download for System Center 2012 SP1 customers.  This connector enables customers to access best practice configuration assessments from System Center Advisor via the System Center Operations Manager console. The preview bits are available at the Microsoft Download Center.  We also recently announced that System Center Advisor supports configuration analysis for Windows Server 2012 and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 workloads.
  • Windows Azure Backup now is available in a public paid preview. Windows Azure Backup helps customers protect important server data offsite with automated backups to the cloud, where it is available for easy data restoration.
  • On March 28, Microsoft announced commercial availability of Global Service Monitor (GSM) . GSM extends the application monitoring capabilities in System Center 2012 SP1 using Windows Azure locations around the globe, giving a true reflection of end-user experience of your application. Customers can sign up for the service today. 
  • Microsoft is participating in OpenDaylight, a collaborative, open source project to advance Software-Defined Networking (SDN). By participating in the multi-platform endeavor, Microsoft is demonstrating our commitment to an open, extensible and standards-based approach to SDN and network virtualization.

For more information about MMS 2013 news, please visit the Microsoft News Center.  Follow the conversation on Twitter at #MMS2013.