Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2010: Keynote Speech

I’m going to talk about a lot of things today, and I’m going to center much of what I say in the cloud.

I know there are some other things on your mind, and I’ll try to get to all of them, but I want to start off on this Partner Conference where I’ve started off the last few years, you, your importance and your transition to this world of the cloud.

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This last year has been a phenomenal year for Microsoft, all things considered. We certainly started the financial year, as did all of you, coming in the center of the gloom of the financial crisis. And yet throughout the year, through the incredible efforts, the incredible hard work of our partners around the world, we have certainly seen our business accelerate in amazing ways.

And that acceleration is due to you. As a company we remain built entirely on the backs of the relationships that we have with partners. For the success, for your energy, for the investment that you make every day in understanding our technologies and helping our customers I want to start by saying to all of you thank you. Thank you for your work on Windows 7 and what that has done for PC sales and unit volumes. Thanks for your work on Microsoft Office. We’ve had an incredible reception to the new version of Office, Office 2010, SharePoint, Exchange.

Thank you for what you’ve done for the Microsoft Online Services. Literally thousands of new enterprise customers in the last several months, through your good and hard work, have signed up and are migrating to Exchange Online and SharePoint Online as we speak.

Thank you for your good work certainly with the new releases of Windows Server and SQL Server. We’ve had over 670,000 trial downloads of the new release, SQL Server 2008 R2, in just the last two months as many of you and the customers you serve look to build new solutions based around SQL Server.

Thank you for the support of Windows Azure. A year ago, we had nobody, zero people using Windows Azure. Today, there’s over 10,000 paying customers, partners and end customers, who are building applications and moving forward with Azure.

And the list doesn’t end there. The progress we’ve made eclipsing 30 percent now with the virtualization market comes through the hard work and efforts and energy of our partners.

So, together we’ve driven a lot of volume, we’ve made a lot of business, we’ve helped a lot of customers around the globe improve their business and emerge stronger from the economic difficulties of the preceding 12 months. And for all of that I want to say thank you, thank you, thank you, and I want to say a thank you in advance, because I’ll tell you, there’s as much to do or more in the next 12 months as there has been in the last 12 months. To all of you thanks, we really appreciate the partnership. (Applause.)

I’m going to start with the opportunities now for all of us in the cloud. The cloud continues to bring new opportunities.

I had a chance to give a speech that wound up really in my mind framing how we think about the cloud, and what it is enabling us to do, and us to do together with you for our customers. I gave this speech back in about February, March, actually at a university in the United States, and I want to go through those themes for you again. We really focused in on a number of key dimensions of the cloud, and I’m going to run through those, and I want to make sure that each and every one of them, what the transformation is that’s coming from the cloud and why we should all be excited about it. The new things we’ll be able to do for our customers is clear to all of us.