An Ecosystem Beyond Others: TechEd 2013 Did Not Fail To Impress

A lot has changed over the last few years as far as computing is concerned. Apple built up the mobile ecosystem, followed by Google’s Android project and now Microsoft has entered the game.

Mobility has taken the world by storm, cloud computing is now a practical reality, and Big Data is just about making significant amounts of impact in the enterprise. But it almost seems like the world is moving at rates far beyond anyone’s control. The rate at which disruptive technologies are entering the marketplace is quite exponential, and it will continue to be so given the current trends.

I recently had the chance of attending Microsoft’s TechEd 2013 event in Bengaluru held primarily for developers, IT professionals, CIOs with a technical bent of mind and the likes. I had also had the opportunity to attend TechEd 2010 in Mumbai and I must say so much has changed - the entire IT ecosystem to begin with.

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Yes, in terms of roles and responsibilities, you still have the pure segmentation of developers, architects and managers (CIOs), but now the technology itself has gone so far, that without events like this one would certainly be completely lost.

As someone who has a keen interest in Enterprise Technology and has been working in the industry as a correspondent over the last four years, I am very impressed with the ecosystem that Microsoft has created for its community.

If you look at the sales patterns, Android was the number on mobile OS in India, it still might be, but you don’t really see the same kind of commitment in terms of developer education being made by Google.
Microsoft has long been invested in the Indian market, and TechEd 2013, only re-affirmed their commitment to their developers as much as it did to their technologies.

In his keynote, on day 2, Eric Rudder, Chief Technology Strategy Officer at Microsoft shared his plans about building quality consumer and enterprise services and making a large impact with Microsoft products like Office 365, Dynamics, Exchange, Sharepoint and so on. Part of all the excitement really was about how easy convenient Microsoft’s next generation product line is to integrate into your current IT setup.

Rudder demonstrated how Microsoft has made a lot of headway into the cloud environment and made it extremely easy for administrators to manage and deploy virtual machines, private clouds, virtual storage, and the likes. It was even more interesting to see these things in real time.

The sessions covered products such as Server 2012, Mobility, Application Development lifecycles and the likes. However, really experiencing these technologies and sitting in on workshop sessions really gives you a good idea of what to expect from Microsoft, whether you are a consumer or an enterprise user, or a CIO.

As a company it is also great to see Microsoft make significant investments in working with 1.2 million developers, over 1000 Independent System vendors to empower them with the tools, technologies and training required to develop high end skills and compete in the global marketplace. Very few other technology giants (except maybe for the technology services vendors) invest in education events of this scale. Apart from that, watching enthusiastic developers talk and passionately discuss their favorite technologies shows the extent of the ecosystem that Microsoft has created.

All said and done, with Microsoft, technology management just got slightly easier, not only for CIOs, but for their developers, IT architects and system managers too.