The Demo and the Demo Platform at the Microsoft Technology Centers

More about what my team and I do:

From https://www.microsoft.com/services/microsoftservices/mtcoffer.mspx:

Capitalizing on expert knowledge, best practices, and industry leaders, the MTC staff can show your organization how to get the most out of Microsoft .NET-connected technologies. Whether you are envisioning, architecting, or evaluating solutions, we have offerings to meet your needs.

One of the things that goes on at an MTC is the Strategy Briefing:

This one-day briefing provides an overview of Microsoft .NET strategy and technologies. We will examine your company's current IT environment, technical needs and business objectives, and then deliver a clear picture of how Microsoft products and solutions can help you reach your business goals.

That part about delivering a "clear picture of how Microsoft products and solutions can help you reach your business goals" is where our demo comes into play. Our goal is to build, deploy, and support (as best we can) this demo, which helps Microsoft's customers envision solutions and opportunities that can help their business succeed.

To make the demo scenarios function, a variety of products and technologies need to be installed, configured, integrated, and sometimes developed. This is what we consider to be the "demo platform". Once the demo platform exists, anyone at an MTC can add different data sets and content to the platform that are required to support different demo scenarios. We build all of this on virtual machines running on Virtual Server 2005. Each MTC runs a copy of this set of virtual machines. Right now we are running the demo on about 14 virtual machines, but an updated version that we are working on will have more than that.

It's really exciting to present this demo to customers and see the light go on as they envision new opportunities and new solutions to existing problems, all because of what Microsoft's software can do.