Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2012: Focus on Business Customers

Microsoft focused a main part of its Worldwide Partner Conference on its business customers this year.

On Tuesday morning, a presentation on various business-related topics such as cloud, business technology, windows phone and Office 365 were covered. Each of these focuses aimed to demonstrate how Microsoft's programs work well for business customers and big companies.

Close to 16,000 people are in attendance of the annual conference which consists of 640,000 partners from around the world who are informed about Microsoft's plans for the coming year.

Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business, covered three primary focuses in his keynote address:

-Windows Server 2012 will be released to manufacturers in August and available to everyone else by September.

- A Community Technology Preview edition is currently available consisting of various technologies that will run alongside Windows Server and Systems Center.

-A "Hyper-V Switch Program," which includes training and software tools, is available for users transitioning from Microsoft competitor VMware to Microsoft's Hyper-V.

Both Nadella and Kirill Tatarinov, president of Microsoft's Business Solutions division, focused heavily on the company's cloud, saying that around 60 percent of Microsoft Dynamics CRM customers have chosen cloud services for their device operations. Dynamics CRM is Microsoft's software created to meet the needs of sales teams.

Vahe Torossian, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Worldwide Small and Midmarket Solutions and Partners Group, shared that Microsoft currently has 55,000 partners selling Microsoft cloud products regularly. He also added that Microsoft's biggest online business software products are selling to close to 80 million people. The three biggest business programs include Windows Intune, a cloud service for PC security and management, Dynamics CRM Online, and Office 365. Dynamics CRM is however the only Dynamics software in the cloud. Dynamics NAV, for example, are not.

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