I have to say my first MMS conference was a great experience. Not only did I have a chance to meet a lot of great new people, I also go to see first hand Microsoft’s messaging and go-to-market strategies around the entire System Center platform. The keynotes were great (thanks for streaming them live), if you didn’t catch them, you can watch them online here: Tuesday and Wednesday. I thought Bob Muglia did a great job explaining “the cloud” in his keynote on Tuesday and provided some nice examples of how Microsoft is utilizing their own management framework for Azure and Bing.

I sat in on Edwin Yuen’s session, “BD02 Understanding How Microsoft Virtualization Compares to VMware” and I thought he did a great job at keeping it high level. I tweeted a few things while at the session, I think the best message I heard was:

VMDoug: "It's all about management, pick the hypervisor that works for you. You don't need to replace VMware" @edwinyuen #mms2010

That message fits in perfectly with the announcement Veeam made on Tuesday about closing the loop on VMware management. With the new Veeam/nworks Management Pack and PRO Pack combination, customers will be able to monitor and manage VMware from System Center the same way they manage Hyper-V. I know to a lot of the VMware crowd this may seem like a bit of a stretch, but remember, it’s about management, not the hypervisor. You can check out a video explanation by Veeam’s own Alec King here on YouTube:

Another great success at MMS was our book giveaway. Veeam gave out 500 copies of the book “Microsoft System Center 2007 R2 Unleashed”. Two of the authors, Kerrie Meyler and Cameron Fuller (pictured below), were at the Veeam booth signing copies and the lines were pretty long.

If you didn’t get a copy of the book at MMS don’t worry, Veeam has additional copies that we’ll be giving out at special events throughout the year.