Microsoft Heroes event reveals tsunami of new products

The launch events majored on Windows Server 2008, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, as well as security fixes, web, virtualisation and better business intelligence – altogether, the next generation of Microsoft’s infrastructure and application platform products. “IT professionals and developers tell us they spend too much time and money managing existing systems and not enough investing in new capabilities that create strategic advantage,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “That feedback is at the core of the innovations in this new wave of products.” Communications provider Verizon Business is one company that says that it its hosted customers worldwide will now get “greater reliability, performance and control over their IT infrastructure”. It also cites Microsoft’s Windows Deployment Services suite, which it says will allow the company to increase the speed of its deployments and simplify management. “This next-generation technology means a great deal to our enterprise customers,” said Michael Marcellin, vice president of product marketing at Verizon Business. “We are poised to continue to deliver innovative solutions to customers around the globe that will help them harness the power of the Internet.” Meanwhile, the performance improvements and new features of SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 have resulted in some record-breaking results, release yesterday. Microsoft published breakthrough performance benchmarks for several of its customer scenarios, including on Microsoft Dynamics CRM (customer relationship management), Microsoft Dynamics AX, Siemens Teamcenter and Camstar MES (manufacturing execution systems. Microsoft also announced that Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with .Net Framework 3.5 delivers faster throughput than IBM WebSphere 6.1 on Red Hat Linux – as shown through two new benchmark tests measuring scalability and performance in mission-critical enterprise scenarios.