Microsoft Hosting Blog

It's nice to see so much blog and Twitter activity about Azure today at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC). People seem to agree that Microsoft is positioning Azure right in terms of price, features, open standards support and tooling. I was hearing a lot of positive comments at WPC around the business model and the SLA commitments, especially SQL Azure.

 

I'm also hearing a lot of positives from an interesting audience: our hosting partners. It seems that some hosters really *get* that the commitment to open standards and interoperability in the Azure Services Platform, combined with the partner-friendly business models, opens up some new opportunities for them. Instead of competing with hosters, Microsoft seems to be saying, "if you want to build a control panel or a managed service on top of Azure and resell it as your own, go for it." Hosters spend a lot of time in the cloud, so it's no surprise that they see how powerful Azure is, but it's interesting how quickly some hosters have jumped right to the punch line: "if I can still sell my own branded services on Azure, but I don't have to spend money on infrastructure and automated systems management, the Azure is just a supplier to me like any other. I can build customer-ready services on Azure that extend and compliment my dedicated business, and price them and brand them as my own." I predict hosters will be some of the more creative early adopters of the Azure Services Platform.

 

- Dave Wright, industry director, SaaS ISVs, Microsoft Communications Sector

Philbert Shih, Tier1 Research

March 10, 2009

 

T1R recently attended the Microsoft Hosting Summit, an annual event held in the rather quaint yet growing suburb of Bellevue, Washington. The event is host to 350 attendees that represent Microsoft's top hosting partners – ranked in terms of revenue generation. The majority of hosting companies represented are from North America, although there is significant representation from Europe and Asia. Hosting companies from 38 countries were represented. The event also included a number of partner vendors and limited analyst and press coverage, with T1R the recipient of the lone invitation extended to an analyst firm.

The goal of this event is for Microsoft to get in front of partners and present its vision for the hosting sector. This involves discussions and presentations focused on Microsoft's product roadmap and market strategy, along with discussions of new technologies. The event is also a forum, with Microsoft soliciting feedback and engaging partners in discussions. This happens quietly but is a crucial aspect of the event, and the outcome of these conversations is often the inspiration for various different product developments.

The general tone

In terms of the event's tone and atmosphere, there was a lot of continuity from last year. This was significant because last year marked a significant departure from 2007. The 2007 event was all about the changing nature of Microsoft's competitive posture. There was tension about this issue, but perhaps most important it was the uncertainty. Between 2007 and 2008, Microsoft has gone to great lengths to clarify its competitive positioning and strategy. While nobody looks forward to the entry of a well-heeled competitor, the hosting channel has come to term with it and are moving forward. The tone of this year's event reflected the progress that has been made on this front. Everyone has accepted the changes and moved on. There seems to be a realization among the hosting channel partners that there remain significant opportunities in new technologies and growth segments. This is not a sunset industry. Back in 2007, T1R's presentation at the summit provocatively asked, 'How can you avoid getting steamrolled?' Fast forward to 2009, and the discussion is centered on real ways of addressing that issue, along with the realization that the steamroller's momentum is anything but inevitable. It is a welcome change.

Strategic directions

Microsoft is pushing its partners in a clear direction and that is upward into higher-margin managed services. We clearly can't argue with the logic. Moving up the value chain is the path to higher ARPU, enhanced stickiness and a closer trusted advisory relationship between a provider and customers. It is the foundation of a core IT service relationship. Microsoft hopes this will open the door to other offerings – most notably hosted applications.

Applications are a key to the future of the hosting game, but T1R was intrigued by the attention paid to the importance of Web-based management interfaces and on-demand provisioning. This was mentioned in the keynote, but was also a big part of a technology demo focused on Hyper-V and System Center. Microsoft demonstrated how hosters can leverage these technologies to not just make their hosting infrastructure more efficient, but how they can productize it. An excellent example was MaximumASP, a hoster in Kentucky, which used this technology to build a virtual server product featuring an interface that allows customers to procure and provision on demand. These capabilities were also on display in an example of a fictional hosting company. The key point is that Microsoft is pushing technologies that help hosters move in the direction they need in order to be successful in today's market. This makes Microsoft a natural partner for hosters looking for ready made technologies to enable on-demand and cloud-type procurement and provisioning.

There was also plenty of discussion surrounding the emerging trend of cloud computing. Most hosters still disagree over exactly what cloud computing is (don't we all), but there is definitely a lot more interest in getting into this game compared with last year. Microsoft did a good job of shaping the conversation at the event (along with Tier1's help), letting hosters know that they tools are there to make this happen and other options – such as Azure – are also coming with the same objectives in mind. As T1R's presentation emphasized, we are still very early in the game and there are far from any real winners yet. The opportunity is there and Microsoft needs to continue pounding on that message. Getting involved with cloud will enable Microsoft to capture an emerging segment within the marketplace that sits right in the sweet spot of many of its partners.

Overall, it was a productive event in terms of keeping the dialogue going in the right direction. There was not any news on the product front, though partners continue to be hungry for it. This is any area that Microsoft will have to work on, though to its credit it has done a better job of this and is working with certain internal constraints. Hosting partners want and need a clearer roadmap. They need to know when things are coming and in what form they will come in. A certain level of clarity will go a long way. T1R also thought that Microsoft could have provided some more information on how hosters can customize environments and applications. This has some potential for product differentiation and although not all hosters spend a lot of time on software development, maybe providing more bridges between Microsoft-based ISVs and Microsoft-based hosters would be a great idea.

T1R was encouraged by the amount of feistiness from both Microsoft and its hosting partners. We get the sense that the sector is more cognizant than ever of the transformative forces shaping the sector and what has to be done to combat it. There is a deeper sense of urgency and a willingness to pursue new technologies, strategies and approaches. If change is the underlying pulse, then we have to be optimistic about the sector's chances at forging ahead. As many hosters have come to realize, there is more competition, and there is a lot to be concerned about. However, the game is far from over, and in Microsoft, they have access to many different enabling technologies (and services) that can help lead them to where they need to go.

 

Web Host Industry Review Blog

Liam Eagle

March 5, 2009

 

The event sessions concluded Thursday with a panel discussion moderated by Dan Golding of Tier 1 research, who also presented the day’s first keynote, and featuring John Engates of Rackspace, Anton Loeffen of YouSaaS and Matthew Taylor of ViaWest.

I’d say there’s pretty rarely an astonishing revelation during a panel discussion like this, but I do think they tend to be a good opportunity to gain some insight of the variety that doesn’t typically tend to surface in a rehearsed presentation. And Golding is a good moderator, so things stayed pretty interesting.

Probably partly because we’re in an awfully like-minded crowd here, and partly because they’re just the top-of-mind topics right now, we heard a lot about the same subjects that have come up throughout the sessions and throughout the event.

The first major subject of discussion was the economy, which has pretty unsurprisingly had an impact on all of the providers represented on the panel (and presumably, on just about everyone in attendance). The really key points made here were that while recession has perhaps slowed interest in things like colocation, it has opened up the hosting market to a lot of people who would have otherwise maybe invested in their own infrastructure. The recession is definitely making the case for moving from cap ex to op ex, which is a big hosting selling point.

Each of the panelists has seen some customers go out of business, which is really the reason the recession is going to cost companies like these. And it’s difficult to profile an at-risk customer at this point. It’s really a portion of companies across the board losing out, rather than a particular vertical.

One of the ways these companies are working to address the recession is helping to restructure customer deals, moving them maybe on to a more affordable service, rather than see them fail and disappear as a customer altogether.

The other really big point during the discussion was cloud computing. Here, again, not a ton of new information or eye-opening insight, but a general agreement that this is a for-real technology (not a fad) that is going to have an impact on the way hosts do business.

One interesting point – Golding asked Engates whether the cloud-based services Rackspace is developing (or acquiring in the case of SliceHost and JungleDisk) might cannibalize some of the market for the company’s existing services. Engates said he hoped he developed something good enough to do that, because if he doesn’t, somebody else is going to.

Taylor said he believes that, like we’ve heard before, independent of infrastructure, success in cloud computing is going to come down to service and relationships. And that is particularly true in hard economic times.

Web Host Industry Review Blog

Liam Eagle

March 5, 2009

 

The first keynote presentation on Thursday was delivered by Tier 1 Research VP Dan Golding. As an analyst, he set out to give an overview of market conditions that might affect hosting providers, and in particular, he set out to address the cloud computing issue.

Rather than the fluffy angle (I’m not sure if that was a pun), he said, he wanted to discuss how cloud computing is affecting hosting providers right now, and how it’s going to be affecting hosting providers in the future.

He offered a definition of a “cloud” offering. Pretty standard stuff we’ve all heard before, but a couple of his key requirements were that it’s available on-demand (especially in terms of provisioning) and it has to have some kind of granular billing, along with a few other criteria.

Interesting point – he says you shouldn’t confuse enabling technologies with the product in the cloud computing business. For instance, a product that uses virtualization isn’t necessarily a cloud product, and a cloud product doesn’t necessarily use virtualization (though it probably does). Virtualization is just a technology, in this case, not the product.

He identifies “platform as a service” and “infrastructure as a service” as being separate categories of cloud computing. Infrastructure as a service is more akin to how hosts envision a cloud product – a replacement for specific infrastructure bits and pieces like servers. And the customers of those IaaS offerings will be the PaaS operators (his example of that kind of services is Facebook – a kind of platform).

As far as smaller hosts competing in the cloud space, he says there’s plenty of opportunity, because cloud computing is absolutely not a mature technology.

He identifies the big players, with the caveat that history has shown that while there is probably a significant first mover advantage, that doesn’t necessarily translate to winning in the space.

One of the things he really focuses on here is the missteps among the big players (Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce, by the way), all of which could mean opportunities for hosts to win.

The thing that’s interesting here is that a lot of these companies are businesses that posses massive infrastructure, and are trying to turn some of their capacity into a product. But they’re not necessarily built precisely to the specs of what cloud computing could or should or will be.

One of the key considerations is who the target markets for these services are. In Golding’s opinion, they’re SMBs, Enterprises, ISV and SaaS.

The other big question (and one that is really overlooked, he says, by a lot of breathless tech press coverage) is – do people really want cloud computing? Is it the best fit for everyone?

Tier 1 did some “unscientific polling” last year, and their results show that among hosting customers, almost nobody is currently using cloud computing. And there is no runaway leader at this point. The positive outlook would be that the market is really untapped at this point. The converse might be that there is actually no market for cloud computing (that was kind of a joke, I think).

He says mid-tier enterprises are the “sweet spot” for cloud computing (as customers). They have big needs and small resources for capital expenditures. They’re also going to be the big customers for SaaS applications.

Among applications, he feels the top SaaS applications (HR and accounting, messaging and collaboration, CRM, project management, etc.) are the things that are definitely going to move to the cloud, as a platform, and are the subjects best suited to them.

In discussing what hosting providers can deliver in a cloud computing strategy, he showed a pretty interesting chart, outlining what features were important to hosting customers. By far the most important elements were price, flexibility and speed of provisioning. A few of the things that didn’t register at all were brand and “green IT.”

Here is one of the things he really wanted to emphasize: a look at who, among managed hosts, is doing a good job, or an interesting job, in the cloud computing space. They included OpSource, Rackspace, StrataScale, Flexiscale, Terremark, Savvis, Layered Tech, Mezeo and Nirvanix.

One of the first keys to winning in the cloud space is making sure you’re doing all the early maintenance related to security, licensing and other issues that could be sources of failure. Other keys, according to Golding, are identifying a good target market, and riding the new wave of virtualization technology (as enabling technologies go, virtualization is pretty key).

Web Host Industry Review Blog

 

 

In the second keynote of the day, general manager for platform and tools Eddie Amos addressed the company’s plan for hosting providers in a much more direct way than John Zanni did in the earlier presentation. While it was the context before, here software + services is really the subject.

And in this case, the context is (as is often the case these days) cloud computing.

Ask 21 analysts to define cloud computing, says Amos, and you’ll get 21 different answers (I think in this case, I think he was referring to a real scenario). Bascially, the point is that cloud computing is without a real firm definition at this point, but the hype surrounding the term includes optimistic growth predictions from many of those same analysts.

Microsoft’s need to understand the circumstances has to do with the company’s desire to make sure it has the right offerings, and to help its partners go to market.

Microsoft, like any company with a marketing or a strategic agenda, has to devise the right message and take that message to the market. Today that message seems to be that Microsoft’s “software-plus-services” strategy, which is in a manner of speaking its “cloud computing” philosophy, has a big element designed around partners. That’s not a surprising message to hear here, but it’s something they have to work at communicating.

Here’s part of Microsoft’s current case for software-plus-services. Companies across the software business are moving toward a similar strategy. Desktop companies like Adobe and Apple are building cloud components. So are enterprise companies like Oracle and IBM. Consumer web companies (Google, eBay) are building downloadable client applications. And SaaS companies like Salesforce.com are increasing on-premise functions.

Basically, having gone through the cycle of hype surrounding “everything is going to be on the cloud,” the answer is probably somewhere in between that, and everything being on premise. That’s software-plus-services.

Touching on the Azure cloud (another part of Microsoft’s strategy regarding the cloud): “This is a work in motion. And we will have partner opportunities at every one of these steps along the continuum,” he says.  I know that many hosting customers, including some Microsoft partners, are curious about how Azure is going to fit into their relationship. Microsoft seems pretty cognizant of that fact, and seems to be taking care to assure partners that there’s plenty of opportunity for them in the cloud model.

They’re still working on the business model, but they’re looking for feedback from partners at this event. One sure thing is that whatever they end up with related to the cloud, or related to on-premise technology, is going to fit that software plus services message.

I think a really important thing here, if you follow up what John Zanni said about how hosting partners should be designing their businesses to incorporate new services and move up the value chain from the simple commoditized shared hosting type offering, is that Microsoft is building its platform specifically with that kind of partner in mind. That kind of builds on questions asked in the Zanni blog post. That is – Microsoft’s business future depends on building the right platform for the hosting business, and it wants its partners to be the right kind of business to take advantage of the systems the company is building.

PEER 1

Robert Miggins, SVP Business Development

Q: Who are your customers and what do you do for them?

A:  We have a range of customers, mainly in web-centric markets such as SaaS, gaming or web services. We provide fully scalable hosting, from dedicated hosting, to fully managed solutions, as well as collocation. Our goal is to help our customers solve and manage the problems of the internet. This way they can focus on the possibilities of the internet and what they know best: their core business.     

Q: As a Microsoft partner, how can you take advantage of its S+S strategy?

A:   We take advantage of S+S in many ways.  In addition to the SPLA, where we offer our world class service of Microsoft software, there are some new programs.  For instance, PEER 1 is a member of the BizSpark program, which caters to startups and ISVs.  We have seen a lot of potential with these programs and have been able to not only reach new customers, but also provide resources to current customers.

Q: In your view, what challenges do you see for the hosting industry, and more specifically your business in the next two years?

A: With the global economy today, our challenge is to properly explain the cost savings and logic of outsourcing.  It lets you do much more with a fixed, or shrinking, IT budget.  It’s really a huge opportunity, actually.  By outsourcing IT, companies not only can save costs and headcount, they can improve other areas of their business because they don’t have to take time to focus on IT issues.

Q: What role does Microsoft play in the industry and how do you work with them as a partner?

A:  Microsoft has several roles – the most important of which is their product lineup for hosting (Windows Server 2008, IIS, Microsoft SQL, etc)   We work very closely with our account manager, Suren Singh, to stay abreast of the latest releases for our products as well as keeping our sales and support teams properly informed and trained.  In addition, we look for ways to participate in co-marketing programs with Microsoft to help drive lead generation for our Microsoft products. 

Q: What are your goals for attending the Hosting Summit this year?

A:  Staying current with Microsoft’s product roadmap and vision for hosting.  Secondly, it’s a great chance to mingle with other leaders in the hosting industry. 

 

Doug Keely - Inspiring journey of Earnest Shackleton and his mastery of leadership of his crew and the situation dire circumstances, like now to keep a strong business focus in tough economic circumstances.

Martha Bejar, Corporate VP, Communications Sector

Hosting Summit is Martha's favorite event and articulated that Microsoft's ability to partner and grow our business with our Hosting providers is crucial to our mutual success.

Hosting over the next 10 years with 20% growth in addition to the existing 100 Million unmanaged mailboxes that can be captured and moved into hosting.

Recent announcements in Software plus Services make the approach a choice between partnership, head-to-head competition and creative ideas about working together

Communications Sector will be partners’ voice into Microsoft, we will continue to invest in the channel and we will be successful!

John Zanni, GM, WW Software Plus Services Industry, Communications Sector

Great opportunity for business as in hosting 20% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next 4 years, hosting continues to grow!

Mass, dedicated and shared hosting margins are starting to shrink but still are growing between 9% and 10% year-over-year. However, managed hosting is growing at a rate upwards of 20% for better profitability!

By the end of 2009, 76% of all US companies will have at least one hosted SaaS application

The options customers will have to choose from will be to self host, have a partner host or have Microsoft host the solution, we are agnostic about the delivery model

In terms of hosting channel enablement, our releases such as the Hyper-V licensing whitepaper, SQL 2008 and Hyper-V fast start program, web hosting sales kit and growing MSPP hosting community makes our commitment to the sales channel better than ever!

Investments in cross platform enablement on Windows is key to our solutions (PHP, Ruby On Rails, Java) as well as leveraging the System Center Suite Enterprise and the latest release of the Dynamic Data Center Tool Kit

Great video and demo by Hyder Ali on building and enabling a managed offering leveraging Hyper-V and Server Management Suite Enterprise (SMSE)!

Eddie Amos, GM, Developer Platform and Tools

Great hosting interaction with the Developers tools team and Hosting

Tough economic conditions force lower IT spending but software acquisition have been deferred, not cut and software plus services is a way to deliver rich application services at a lower cost

$16.2B today of cloud computing increasing to $42B by 2012 according to IDC, incredible but how will this take place, what kind of cloud market will be leveraged? Software as a service? App as a service? Software platform as a service? Virtual infrastructure as a service? Physical infrastructure as a service?

Key investments in developing PHP apps with Expressions web, Visual Studio working with Hyper-V images and BizSpark and DreamSpark free developer tools are examples of how we would look to hosters to deploy and support these applications

Bill Hilf, GM, Windows Server Marketing & Platform Strategy

Windows Server platform core to Microsoft’s success

Cross platform support is very important, such as working with PHP support in IIS, SQL PHP driver, Expressions web for PHP Dev - Hosters should love this, especially shared!

New initiative "Everything in Between" support for ASP.NET and PHP - Great focus!

 

-Chris Samson, senior hosting technology specialist, Microsoft

Web Host Industry Review Blog

Liam Eagle

March 4, 2009

 

One of the early presentations Wednesday was delivered by John Zanni, general manager worldwide communications sector software-plus-services.

I’ve seen a couple of sessions in the several hours since the presentation, and since I’ve had the chance to digest it a little and look at it in the context of a couple other presentations.

I get the feeling these keynotes are pretty broad-strokes discussion of philosophy and strategy. So whatever specifics might be lacking, I can only assume is material better suited to the breakout sessions later in the afternoon.

As much as this conference is about connecting with partners, this is a pretty cool aspect of that. And I get the feeling that Microsoft kind of relishes the opportunity to communicate those strategic and philosophical feelings to partners directly like that.

Enough about what these presentations aren’t about, though. I should really focus on what they are about.

Zanni’s presentation was, broadly, about “software + services,” which is really his area of focus.

Using data from IDC and Tier 1, he looked at the performance of hosting businesses in the current economic environment. Both the shared and dedicated hosting markets are still growing at about 10 percent per year (give or take a percentage point or two), and it should continue into 2011, according to Tier 1.

Growth is nothing to sneeze at in the current economy, and Microsoft is still building solutions for those markets, but it has another model in mind for hosting partners.

As Zanni puts it, the company wants to focus on driving new sources of revenue for a business with diminishing margins (even if the market is growing). Managed hosting, in addition to having better margins, is seeing more growth too, more in the 25 percent year-over-year range.

Simply put, Microsoft thinks its hosting partners should move up the value chain, by looking at new services they can build into their offerings, a philosophy that is specifically part of how the software + services strategy relates to the hosting market.

Providing more complex managed services makes you the “trusted provider” to your customers, which increases loyalty, increases revenue per customer and reduces churn.

Microsoft’s evolved model involves a lot of choice for end customers – between partner-hosted offerings, on-premise technology and Microsoft-hosted solutions.  Of course, there’s a clearly defined role for partners in that model.

As far as providing for partners in this system, Zanni says Microsoft has been building out its Service Provider Partner program to better connect the dots between hosting providers and ISVs looking for the means to distribute their applications, or a place to host them. On top of that function (which has existed for a while) the company has been working on adding functions for connecting private label partner products with resellers.

Included in a DVD distributed to attendees (something I’ll get into more once I get my hands on one – rest assured) is the Hosting Sales Kit, which includes sales scripts for email and web hosting.

It also includes the “dynamic data center tool kit,” which contains guidance, sample code, best practices and other collateral, designed to build and launch a managed service offering.

The presentation included a live demonstration of a fictional managed hosting company (called Contoso, and built for the purpose of demonstrating the managed hosting concept for these partners) built around virtualization using Hyper-V. It also showed a live demonstration of some of the concept and controls via an exploration of several virtual machines provisioned on the servers of Microsoft partner MaximumASP.

One of the things that jumps out, here, is how much of Zanni’s presentation was about encouraging hosting partners to move up the value chain. It’s not a surprising stance (I might suggest that most of the folks who have opinions about this sort of thing share this particular opinion), but it is a little surprising to me that the point still has to be made. I’m curious whether there’s some hesitation among hosts to make that move, or whether there’s actually a resistance to the idea (I sort of doubt that).

I’m also kind of curious about specifically how Microsoft plans to profit from partners moving in that direction (not that there’s anything sinister about it – but that side of the relationship wasn’t as key to the presentation). I think Larissa’s going to have a chance to talk to John Zanni later, and she’ll ask him to flesh out the give-and-take between Microsoft and partners there.

Anyhow, the presentation went on for more than an hour, and I’ve only covered part of what was said, but this post is getting very long, and I’ve got other things to cover. I’d like to think there’s enough here to make it worth reading, though. If not, you can look forward to a half-dozen more posts today.

Web Host Industry Review Blog

Liam Eagle

March 4, 2009

 

The sessions kicked off Wednesday with a “welcoming remarks” presentation by Martha Bejar, corporate vice president, communications sector.

She started out by describing Microsoft’s current vision to “create experiences that combine the magic of software with the power of internet services across a world of devices.”

She described the company’s communications sector strategy: “partner with service providers [that, just so we’re clear, includes hosting service providers] to leverage our respective assets and collective strengths to deliver rich user experiences across a world of devices”

Bejar spent a lot of the presentation describing what the communications sector piece of Microsoft does, and how that relates to partners. A lot of that had to do with introducing the teams involved in operating that sector.

It’s events and presentations like these that really give you a taste of the size of the company and the scope of work (and strategizing) going on at Microsoft.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t offer up a whole lot of strategy on which to report.

She did describe the crowd – more than 350 attendees from 38 countries.  The objectives for the event are to share Microsoft’s vision and strategy, provide a forum for networking and collaboration and listen to partner feedback.

But this is just the opening remarks. I have a feeling there will be lots more to report in the presentations to come.

 

 

Layered Tech
John Pozadzides, Chief Marketing Officer

Q: Who are your customers and what do you do for them?
A:    Layered Tech clients range from small and medium sized companies up to large enterprises, all who share a common need for outsourced hosted infrastructure.  Layered Tech provides a wide range of offerings including dedicated servers, advanced hosted infrastructure including firewalls and load balancers, and class leading cloud computing offerings.  We augment all of our infrastructure offerings with professional managed services.

 

Q: In your view, what challenges do you see for the hosting industry, and more specifically your business in the next two years?
A:   The hosting industry is going through dramatic changes as we shift from almost entirely dedicated legacy platforms towards virtualized and cloud-like infrastructure.  Many providers are behind the curve in terms of virtualization adoption and this will make it difficult to assist clients looking for just these types of services. Layered Tech’s biggest challenge is to develop a sales methodology that allows us to properly qualify client needs, match them to the correct infrastructure solution, and accurately convey the reasons the solution is ideal for their situation.

Q: What role does Microsoft play in the industry and how do you work with them as a partner?
A:  Clearly Microsoft is a major player in the hosting industry, especially for clients in the Enterprise space.  We rely on Microsoft to maintain the operating systems that underlie some of the most important messaging, collaboration and database applications, and we look to Microsoft for leadership in terms of virtualization and other leading edge technology development.  

Q: What are your goals for attending the Hosting Summit this year?
A:  I’m looking forward to networking with peers and getting directional and product updates from Microsoft.

 

 

 

 

The Hosting Platform Architects workshop had good attendance (25) with key areas of interest such as automation, site administration around load balancing in IIS and virtualization.

 

Cyra Richardson - Introduced some great tools such as the WPI (web platform installer) URL rewrite tool, Application Request Routing (ARR), automation of provisioning tasks that previously was handled a majority of the time by MPS (32 bit only) and future considerations that provisioning needs to have, not just PowerShell.

 

Walter Oliver - High Availability Shared Hosting

• ARR can be a great, low overhead alternative to Hardware Load Balancing (H/W LB) with a more intelligent solution. This is possible by actually enabling host headers lookup, accessing the memory space lookup to route to target host for request

 Mark Stevenson, Virtual Dedicated Hosting

• Good review of networking considerations of a Hyper-V server, multiple architecture models (stand-alone, farm), System Management Suite Enterprise (SMSE) component review (Data Protection Manager, Configuration Manager, Operations Manager, Virtual Manager Manager)

 See you at Day 1 of Hosting Days!

 

 -Chris Samson, Senior Hosting Technology Specialist, Microsoft

 

The Microsoft Hosting Summit is an annual, invitation-only event for Microsoft’s hosting partners taking place March 3 – 5, 2009.

 

The event is comprised of speaking sessions that cover important topics impacting the industry today, including software plus services, Hosted Exchange, and Hosting in a Web 2.0 world. The breakout sessions will be organized into the following tracks: technology, services and operations.

 

Stay tuned for real-time blogging from the show, along with news highlights and photos!