MMS 2013 - Day 1

Even though on Sunday, we had registration and a couple of sessions, the day that the keynote speech starts is the day that most people count as Day 1 here at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS). This is a quick post to bring people up to speed about what went on over here yesterday (Monday 8th April) and a primer for what's going on today (Tuesday 9th April).

The Keynote

At 09:00 yesterday morning, all 5000 plus attendees were packed into the Event Center in the Mandalay Bay Hotel. This was a far better room to host the Keynote speech than the ballroom that hosted it at this event in this same hotel back in 2011. When we arrived at the Event Center, we were greeted with some cool tunes from Microsoft's Joey Snow and even though there were some WiFi issues throughout that hotel at the time (for a room full of nerds, this was a Major problem!), he kept us all occupied with his choice of music.

Here's Joey warming up the crowd

The Internet being down across the hotel was a blocker for the Keynote starting at it's original time of 08:30 (all the demo's had to run with Internet connectivity) but once they got the problems sorted, Brad Anderson - Corporate Vice President of Program Management in Microsoft’s Windows Server and System Center Group (WSSC) - came onstage to do his thing.

The Keynote this year was titled "Cloud Optimize Your Business with Microsoft Management Solutions" and it a basic description of it's content taken direct from the MMS site is here:

With a set of breakthrough new products and growing industry momentum, Microsoft is transforming IT management. The new capabilities of Windows Server 2012 with System Center 2012 SP1 enable customers to build and manage elastic infrastructures while reducing complexity, improving deployment of critical applications, and advancing the consumerization of IT. In this keynote session, Brad Anderson will demonstrate how Microsoft technologies deliver new cloud capabilities, and he will showcase how customers are already realizing gains in productivity, growth, and innovation through Microsoft solutions.
 

For me, although there was no new information around any vNext content, I did think that the customer case study examples and video's (Domino's Pizza, Toyota, Sundance Institute) that they showed during the presentation were excellent and will go a long way to helping consultants like me drive our customers over onto the Microsoft platform and away from the 'other guys' in the virtualization and management space. You can view the entire Keynote on the Microsoft Channel 9 site from this link: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/KEY1 The Sessions I attended a couple of excellent sessions yesterday - one was a DevOps session based on creating web applications in Team Foundation Server (TFS), then monitoring them with SCOM and Global Service Monitor (GSM) and finally triaging problems with the web application right back into TFS through the SCOM integration and alert attachment/intellitrace management packs. Check out the session on Channel 9 here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/AM-B303 The other session I attended was called "Hacking the Data Warehouse: Mastering the Reporting Experience in System Center 2012 Operations Manager". This session was delivered by Veeam and in fairness had no sales pitch - just deep-dive technical SQL stuff to help deliver some cool reports in SCOM. It was no coincidence that a large number of the SCOM community attended this session. Check it out here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/IM-B392  That's all for now, tomorrow I'll be attending some sessions on Windows Azure and System Center 2012 Network Virtualization and I'll post a bit more up here when I get some time. If you want quick and up to date info on what's happening this week at MMS, then get yourself onto Twitter and check out the following hashtags: #MMS2013 and #MMSFUN You can also follow me on: @kgreeneit