TechEd USA 2009 wrap up

Friday concluded this year’s TechED: North America. We were delighted to have thousands of developers, IT professionals and technology decision makers in attendance, gaining insights into how to make their applications, infrastructures and businesses more innovative and cost effective. Both continue to be core priorities in today’s economy.

Bill Veghte announced the availability of the Windows Server 2008 R2 release candidate, which includes some great new features for improved web experiences, scalability, hardware utilization and virtualization. We also continued to talk about the recent WebSphere Loves Windows campaign emphasizing significant cost savings, better efficiency and improved performance when customers run Websphere on Windows Server or take advantage of the .NET Framework for application development. Last, we demonstrated ways in which our customers could unlock the hidden potential in their existing technologies today by leveraging current versions of Windows Server, System Center, SQL Server, BizTalk Server and Visual Studio together.

So where do we go from here? Well, whether you’re a developer, an IT Pro or a decision maker within your organization you should be thinking about a few key things. Darryl Taft put it perfectly in this article when he called out the fact that IT can be a competitive differentiator in today’s economy. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need new features or technology. Think about harnessing the power that lives within your infrastructure today by taking advantage of tools that make it easier to spin up a new web presence, like the Web Platform Installer (WebPI) . Second, keep your skills fresh by leveraging resources like the Ramp Up program at MSDN. And last but not least, speak up! Engage in community dialogue and as always, tell us what you think!