Today was day one of the 4th annual Microsoft Hosting Summit! The Hosting Summit of 2008 is definitely the most anticipated, well attended and the most visible than the previous Summits. Here are my impressions of the sessions I attended.

Martha Bejar, Corporate Vice President, Communication Sector, Microsoft - "Welcoming Remarks"

Martha welcomed all the attendees and of course, stated just how important our hosting. ISV and S+S providers and our overall hosting partner channel are to Microsoft's overall success in our Online Services strategy. Martha provided a good snapshot of the market, stressed the importance of Software + Services (S+S) and hybrid models, such as on-premise and pure hosting. She also highlighted how our partner channel and hosting becoming a competency for the partner program.

John Zanni, Director, US Hosting Business, Microsoft - "Hosting State of the Union"

John, as a great center of knowledge of the overall hosting business and market opportunity, provided a candid reflection of hosting business as filled with "Turmoil," and listed key product releases such as Windows Server 2008, Windows SharePoint Services and Business Productivity Services (BPOS, Hosted Exchange, OCS and SharePoint services of MS Online) termed as creating "heated discussion" as many HMC and hosting partners see this as what it is,  a great opportunity to partner even better with Microsoft to deliver rich S+S services while some see this as direct competition with them. No doubt, it definitely has created good "discussion" points :)

John had some good data points to validate the industry trend he sees, such as referring to "Amazooglesoft" as "gorilla’s" large offerings, pointing out, Amazon’s 333K devs online, wow! In addition, Ad based web 2.0 ISV's are capturing sites from shared hosters and that shared hosting is sinking due to this dynamic! VARS (value-added resellers) and ISV's want to own the customer relationship and must expand services. Key topics such as MS Online and streaming office were top questions John receives from partners.

John highlighted that the IDC forecasts that SaaS (Software as a Service) business 4 Billion in 2006, 2011 it will be 15 Billion. In addition, he stressed if you are an ISV, do what do you best but don't host, partner with a Hosting provider or BPOS (perhaps?). This ISV market will over time, (year 2011) will be larger than entire hosting market! John also stressed importance of partners as core what Microsoft has done historically and what we WILL do moving forward with hosting providers, indeed, something that needs to be stressed over and over! John indicated that we see as well as IDC, that 30 million mailboxes online in next 4 years! BPOS is base platform, while providers need to differentiate on top of it.

Great session John!

John Roskill: US Marketing Corporate Vice President, Microsoft - "Partners in a Software +Services World"

John started off ensuring all the attendees that today at Microsoft, all product teams know that all products need to be web services enabled for the S+S market that our hosting partners deliver! Great start to the presentation, as many in the hosting space still feel we are very Enterprise Centric, which we have been historically and some commented on that but as today hopefully demonstrated, that perception is changing. 

John highlighted that Amazon seen as a competitor with Development and storage (UC2) hosted solutions available today. Also, he reiterated that, given the fact that Google continues to make Google apps and their recent postini integration more full-featured keeps us REALLY focused on making S +S delivered via Microsoft and it's hosting partners the best they can be!

Bob Kelly, Corporate Vice President, Tools and Server Division, Microsoft - "Microsoft Technology Roadmap for Next Gen Hosting"

Bob started off by thanking and reiterating what a Great launch of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008. This was due in part as many of the hosting providers and ISV's in attendance were responsible for the over 1800 Windows Server 2008 systems deployed prior to launch! Wow, that is what I call confidence in our latest releases even in beta and release candidates!

In fact, Bob brought our showcase partner, Go Daddy, on stage. Go Daddy was good and briefly spoke to how IIS 7 has improved their offering. Some attendees thought the delivery was a little too defined and scripted but the validation from a great partner like Go Daddy resonated.

Core to our growth in the S+S market is our Virtualization roadmap diversity was very compelling especially to stress management of our many Virtualization solutions such as Application Virtualization (Soft grid), Server Virtualization (Hyper-V), presentation Virtualization (Terminal Services), Desktop Virtualization (Virtual PC), Storage Virtualization (Storage Server, DPM) and management with our System Center Suite, SCVMM. This segment really stressed the overall breadth and depth of a hosted services portfolio that Microsoft can really help our hosting partners deliver rich services to their customers. Demo of Hyper-V management console in definitely got the WOW factor and demonstrated how core Hyper-V to compelling hosted virtualized offering.

Jeremy Cath: Silverlight demo of how Hard Rock uses Silverlight was really demonstrated well when he showcased how Silverlight can show things like John Lennon's rendering of his notes/songs was a BIG hit! How can Dev's at our providers and ISV's enable this type of development in new apps for Windows? EASY. Use Expressions, Silverlight, and Visual Studio and publish it on IIS 7 baby!

Overall, John provided a good overview of platform and finished services. This really shows how and will our S + S partners fit into this. Key to upcoming events are MMS (Microsoft Management Summit), and the Professional Developers Conference (PDC). Could the PDC be formal technical announcement of the release of BPOS? Maybe :)

Greg Urquhart, General Manager, US ISV & National SI Partners, Microsoft - "The ISV Opportunity"

Greg started of by showing some key IDC industry growth and projections data (some that John Zanni had highlighted earlier) that hosted on demand services are key for ISV's to thrive.  He indicated that today, successful ISV's need look past the browser and focus on rich users experiences!

Hyder Ali - Industry Director Next Web and Bryon Surace - Senior Program Manager, Microsoft -  "Virtualization in Hosting using Hyper-V"

Hyder launched this breakout session by showing a slide that highlighted that there is currently massive growth of virtualization in industry. No surprise there, 10% of Microsoft server sales to date are virtualized. I thought at times, we were little aggressive on criticism of VM Ware's design decisions for ESX (specific to the monolithic model, remember VS 2005 uses that model too) but great distinction between technology differences.

Great demo of hyper-v and discussion of differences between quick migration and live migration, and good highlight of how SCVMM can really take Hyper-V to the next level of managing hundreds and thousands of host machines and thousands and tens of thousands of virtual instances.

Just some notes and impressions, take em or leave em :)

- Chris Samson - Senior Hosting Technology Specialist, Microsoft