It was a interesting keynote live from San Francisco. I saw only the first part with interviewer Robert Youngjohns. After that one of my beloved twins entered the living room swinging angry with a stick so I had to show my father role there… 🙂 Because of that I missed the whole part of Steve Ballmer.
About the interview: Robert spoke with the 4 CIO of Ford Motor Company (Nick Smither), Starwood Hotels (Hoyd Harper), Intel (Diane Bryant) and Continental Airlines. The debate is about the roll of IT during economic reset. How cost savings, productivity and innovation come together to drive business growth.
All 4 CIO experienced the last year as a massive pressure to reduce costs. But they succeeded by using Hyper-V virtualization. One of them said that before they use virtualization technology they had a unused capacity of 80%! Ford told that using Exchange 2010 they have a greater availability and lower costs. Also a good use of AD, Group Policies and Powershell helped them. Intel said that they had a pilot of desktops to migrate to Windows 7. The enthusiasm was so big they expand the pilot to more of the double desktops they had in mind before. After the successful migration to Windows 7 these employees were very happy about using windows 7. It was much faster in doing their work. I thought 97% employees of this pilot were very satisfied by using Windows 7 now.
A few keywords about the debate:
– Control costs
– Increase productivity
– Ensure security
– Reduce complexticity (fewer applications in use)
– Drive innovation
There was a fun part too. Robert told us about touch screens. He remembered teaching his mum (or grandma?) how to use a mouse: Move the mouse over the table, see the pointer moving on the screen. When it is where you wanna have it click the button! Grandma easily said: isn’t it easier to just push your finger on the screen?
I was surprised to hear that Starwood hotels developed a application for customers to send a video postcarde to friends and family. Just nice to know 🙂
Check de site http://www.thenewefficiency.com.
While typing i just see that the whole webcast is available to view at http://www.microsoft.com/business/thenewefficiency/keynote/en/us/.
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