Looking back, this past year has been especially challenging for many IT decisions makers with an increased pressure on IT to make the right choices for their businesses. IT organizations have been tasked with the complexity of working to increase efficiencies and drive down costs, while also finding ways to continue innovating.
At the same time, IT is also increasingly integrated with more and more aspects in our businesses and given the responsibility for creating new ways to reach and connect with customers to help drive the business forward. Along with these challenges and opportunities, I and my peers hope that as we enter 2010, we hit the ground running and emerge from the economic downturn better positioned to use IT as a strategic business asset.
The Microsoft IT organization is focused on a very recognizable strategy to deliver IT solutions and services that drive innovation and business value, including developing our people and capabilities, optimally managing our costs, and attaining our quality, performance and security goals.
Like many of you, including the CIOs and IT decision makers I talk with every day, I read the trends and predictions for 2010. I am encouraged by what I read and I also believe we’re on the verge of a new level of efficiency and productivity for businesses and our workers. Trends and predictions will turn into plans and projects for all of us, and I thought I would highlight some areas of focus I’m excited about for Microsoft IT in 2010.
Global Communications and Collaboration
With our global teams needing to be productive and collaborate, we continue to see benefits from the strong uptake in the adoption of Unified Communications (UC) across the company, which was broadly rolled out in 2009.
We are already seeing benefits through the increased ease of collaboration that our deployment of UC across the company is providing. What I hear most often is that it’s much easier to know the status of coworkers from directly within email or the Office Communicator client and to reach out to them in real time by phone, email or instant message. Our employees also like the productivity gains they see by getting voicemail and audio transcriptions in their email inboxes, along with all their other email. The integrated Office Live Meeting and Communicator conference call capabilities within Outlook provide a more seamless experience, helping to bridge not only the communication experiences on our local campuses, but across the globe as well.
The technology is improving how our teams are working together in a more real time fashion while saving significant costs associated with traditional phones and voice mail, telephony and audio  conferencing, and travel. I look forward to seeing the added benefits as our work force continues to adopt the technology and discover new ways of further expanding their productivity.
Virtualization and Consolidation
For Microsoft and the industry, 2009 was certainly an exciting year for virtualization with it providing the ability to easily consolidate applications and workloads. In 2010 I see these benefits further expanding to our customers, while within Microsoft we’ll be focusing on consolidating and optimizing our SQL Servers running our IT applications. This is an important strategy for reducing space and power consumption in our data centers and for optimizing how we use our existing servers.
Today we have significant numbers of virtualized servers, and I expect to close our fiscal year in June with even more virtualized machines. The result is fewer demands for server hardware and the associated costs including power, cooling and space. Other benefits we’ve seen from Hyper-V virtualization on Windows Server 2008 R2 include:
o We can now build new servers much more quickly than before.
o With our SQL Servers in particular, we are using Hyper-V to help us manage resources for scale, efficient upgrades, and isolating areas where performance can be improved.
o With Microsoft System Center tools, we are able to manage around 3500 servers with 4 employees through the same interface we use to manage physical assets.
o Our strategy for virtualization has demonstrated that retiring older, end-of-life, less efficient hardware means gains on newer, more efficient, less energy consuming new servers.
Environmental Sustainability
One of the highlights of 2009 was the opening of the new Redmond Ridge 1 lab, which was designed to consolidate software development and test labs from the main Redmond campus. This consolidated lab delivers gains in operational efficiencies and also environmental benefits, both in terms of the building’s design and the central management of lab resources, where we are using the virtual machine capabilities of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V.
Labs and data centers are where Microsoft IT can significantly contribute to Microsoft’s environmental sustainability. In our offices we are also paying attention to improving the utilization of IT equipment and technology solutions, including UC, to reduce emissions and energy use. Green IT and environmental sustainability efforts will continue to be a topic this year in the CIO Community and I’m seeing fundamental alignment between smart technology decisions and decisions that are good for the environment.
Leveraging the Cloud
Another important topic of growing interest in 2009 was the cloud. I expect to see that interest escalate with trials and implementations increasing in 2010 as companies continue to look at ways of gaining efficiency and productivity. I wanted to share an example with you from this past year regarding our early adoption of cloud technologies. Microsoft IT had a great experience with our annual charitable Giving Campaign’s auction tool, which we quickly transitioned from a traditional web-based application into an elegant, user-driven Silverlight experience hosted in the cloud on the Azure platform.
The charity auction tool is not heavily used for much of the year, but during our annual Giving Campaign and especially as bidding heats up in the last days and hours, usage spikes and then immediately drops off as bidding closes. A cloud implementation for this application, where there is an irregular demand curve for IT resources, made a lot of sense and served us well.
I know we have several other applications that have irregular peak use periods, and with Azure I will be able to move these apps to the cloud or to in-house cloud servers as needed. We had a lot of fun moving our charity auction tool to the cloud and delivering a greatly improved experience and performance to our employees. I’m also pleased to say that we more than doubled our charitable contributions with the Giving Campaign auction this year, I hope largely in part to the improved availability of the site and the cloud infrastructure.
Employee Productivity and Optimized Desktops
IT’s most traditional role might be supporting our employees with hardware, software, services and support. We have a highly demanding audience of high tech workers, early adopters, gadget geeks, multi-PC users, mobile and home workers. In 2009, Microsoft IT deployed Windows 7 several times from beta to launch, in larger and larger waves of employees. Demand was high and we saw a lot of excitement from employees about using this new operating system and getting the most out of their desktop experience.
Our own deployment process improved during this time frame, with fewer calls for installation support due to the streamlined options for self-installation, online guides for choosing the right IT p_w_picpath, and other proactive communication.
In 2010, we are getting ready for several more significant rollouts including Office 2010. We’re also looking at desktop and application virtualization technologies to help deliver ways of better addressing the needs of our employee’s highly variable and diverse hardware and software environments.
I think we have the potential to see some significant gains in productivity and how people work together in 2010.
 Security
Securing IT for Microsoft will always be on my scorecard. It’s something we invest careful planning around as we protect our corporate network while providing seamless access to IT resources to our employees, partners, and customers from everywhere. Here is a roll call from Microsoft IT:
o Our employees benefit from faster detection of malware and an extremely high level of spam protection with Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange and Forefront Online Protection for Exchange.
o With the new Rights Management capabilities in Exchange Server 2010 we’re experiencing increased data leakage prevention capabilities. Additionally, we have enhanced information protection via our phased rollout of BitLocker disk encryption technology.
o Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) allows our employees safer web use through its protection against malware, malicious web sites and vulnerabilities. What I really find cool about TMG is how it uses a cloud based technology called Microsoft Reputation Services to maintain a centralized database of some 45 million (and growing!) web domains and billions of web pages to help identify and block malicious web sites.
o Forefront Unified Access Gateway is helping us enable remote access via managed and unmanaged PCs and mobile devices. It gives us more granular access controls and reduces management costs and complexity. It also supports our new DirectAccess deployments, making them simpler, more extensible and easier to scale.
As we look ahead to the next six months, I am excited by a number of new releases in the Identity & Security pipeline that we are in the early phase of rollout with, like Active Directory Federation Services 2.0, Forefront Identity Manager, Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint, and Forefront Endpoint Protection.
Increasing our Business Intelligence Savvy
I’ve found successful scorecards have three main elements; goals, accountabilities and metrics, which are business components supported by technology. We’ve demonstrated our CIO Scorecard to hundreds of CIOs and IT decision makers at events and it continues to drive interesting discussions about business process, IT management, technology and making better decisions.
What I like about our scorecard implementation is the visibility and transparency it provides to everyone within the organization of our performance, and the tool includes built in the operational definitions and metrics discussion to improve the ease of use and readability of the information. As part of this scorecard effort, we are early adopters of all Microsoft BI products, including SQL Server and Office as a front end, which power the experience helping to measure our overall performance.
Those are just some of the areas that I am looking forward to working on and expanding in 2010 within Microsoft, as well as for IT in general. I have great expectations for the continued gains in efficiency and innovation growth we will see this year and beyond. We will be deploying a lot of new technologies to our employees and our internal business partners, as well as sharing that learning with our customers and partners through IT Showcase ( www.microsoft.com/itshowcase) and other communications. I look forward to the conversations and discussions I’ll have with many of you on these topics this year.