A jam packed day of great sessions. The opening keynotes featured Kirill Tatarinov, President of the Microsoft Business Solutions Division (MBS) and Kevin Turn, COO.
This is the biggest Convergence yet with over 10,000 attendees. There is a palpable excitement at this event. People are really jazzed to be at the event this year.
Kirill opened with a short introduction and quickly turned the stage over to Kevin Turner. Key messages Kevin discussed:
- The overall theme for this event is Anytime, Anywhere.
- Microsoft has over 1.5 Billion users.
- Spends over $9 Billion on annually on R&D (largest in the world ? and a staggering amount for 1 company)
- Cloud is huge. Forrester predicts cloud to grow from current $40B to over $240B by 2020. Microsoft thinks this is a low estimate.
- Microsoft to embrace all platforms (I have to say I have seen this in action, e.g. Office 2011 for Mac, Apps for Android and iOS, Office 365 works on all browsers and OS, etc.)
- SharePoint is fastest growing Microsoft product, ever. Dynamics is the fastest growing group.
- The central theme for Microsoft moving forward is Re-imagined. Touch and Metro everywhere. Dynamics theme is Proactive. Connected. Mobile.People Centric. Exciting new era.
Next up on the presenters list was Dennis Michalis, GM for Dynamics CRM. Dennis? core messages for CRM:
Power of Possibilities
- A perspective shift to Re-image CRM.
- Central themes for CRM will be Big Data, Social, Cloud, Mobile (and Metro).
- Expanded focus will be on Business Process, Predictive Analytics, Industry Templates and Consumerization.
- CRM Anywhere. Mobility, browser flexibility, social, industry templates, SQL 2012 with Analytics
- We saw a quick demo of the new mobile app, which looks great with it?s Metro look and feel. Also saw SQL 2012 Analytics Dashboard that looked good and a few CRM 2011 templates will be available soon.
- Microsoft also announced an investment in InsideView and cool new integration with LinkedIn.
The keynote was wrapped up with a cool demo of a Win 8 Metro demo of an app that was built for New Belgium Brewing. Color me impressed. I am definitely looking forward to Win 8, especially on a Tablet.
Stay tuned for more?