Channel Greets Exchange 2010
In honor of Veterans Day tomorrow, I'll quote one of my favorite Joe Toye lines from my favorite HBO series, "Band of Brothers": "Where's the best chow? In Berlin."
You could rephrase the quote this week to "Where's the best e-mail server launch? In Berlin." Doesn't have the same punch, somehow, but a big deal for the Microsoft channel all the same.
Microsoft launched the newest version of its $1-billion-plus-per-year e-mail server along with Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server at Tech-Ed Europe in Berlin Monday. Our own Kurt Mackie monitored all the webcasts and posted a lengthy story with a lot of the details about the Software plus Services and unified communications underpinnings of the server here.
The public release meant that Exchange 2010 and the new Forefront Protection product are available as trial downloads.
The Exchange Server 2010 launch comes in the middle of a wave of releases across the Microsoft stack, from Windows 7 a few weeks ago to SQL Server 2008 R2 next year.
Microsoft's been busy priming the channel for all these launches. Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop said yesterday that more than 45,000 partners are trained on Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010. Several vendor partners announced services and solutions around Exchange 2010 in Berlin, including Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Avanade, Dell Inc., EMC Corp., Kaspersky Lab, Symantec Corp. and Unisys Corp.
In support of the product launch, Microsoft released two documents filled with cost-benefit data that could be useful to partners. The studies, done by Forrester Research and based on customer product trials, are "The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Exchange 2010" and "The Total Economic Impact of Windows Server 2008 R2." Check out Kurt's story for a lot of handy links to resources.
Posted by Scott Bekker on 11/10/2009 at 1:23 PM