Today Steve Ballmer engaged the audience with his usual gusto, however it is often overlooked that whilst his style may not be to everyone’s taste the fact that this guy is in charge of one of the most powerful and influential companies on the planet means ignore the content of his presentations at your cost.

He didn’t shy away from the fact that Microsoft are behind the game in terms of search but if anyone thinks that they will go quietly into the night then they are very much mistaken.

Key technology strikes include that last year 4.5 million users were “Exchanged” from Lotus Notes to a Microsoft Exchange Platform, System Centre is growing at 4 times the market rate and has recently overtaken CA into 4th place in terms of market share and are classed as leaders in Gartner’s magic quadrant.

There has also been 8.5 million units sold of Microsoft Vista in the last 12 months and the heat is on the exec team to drive this still further.

Steve was also highly disappointed that an article in today’s New York Times showed how Google are not achieving their advertising revenue targets. A broader smile I have not seen for quite some time.

Technology Stack

The business drivers for many are to do more with less and any significant investments need to be justified with strong ROI.

Fair enough I hear you say but often this manifests itself into no action at all as the status quo will do for now. Keeping upfront and visible costs under control are of course sensible business strategies but the often unseen benefits, that are all too soon forgotten, that IT delivers shouldn’t be underestimated.

Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, System Centre R2, Vista, SBS, Office Communication Server (New Release), Essential Business Server, .NET 4.5 are either with us or are soon to be delivered and some of the key technology features that these posses can yield tangible business benefits, providing you know what you want to achieve.

We won’t cover all these of here as we will be communicating with you either through our web site or through your account manager as a skim of the benefits on this blog won’t really do the technology justice.

Business Meetings

As mentioned yesterday there are many tracks here at the Partner Conference and one of these is Business Leadership and a topic of interest today was how to run an effective meeting.

In summary the top 5 points are:

• Do you need a meeting in the first place?

• What do you want to achieve?

• Who needs to be there?

• When is the best time?

• Where is the best location?

At EACS we also have meeting rules of which one of the most important is to be on time. If you think about this then if you have a team meeting and the team consists of 10 people and 1 person is consistently 5 minutes late. This means that the company loses 45 minutes of productivity every time the 1 person is late. If you have one meeting a week then that is the equivalent of 39 hours a year. How much would that be worth to your company?

Analysts Reaction

The future according to Gartner is that the top priorities for CIO’s across EMEA is to deliver projects that enable growth and link business strategies. Business Intelligence (the ability to use information to make smart choices) will be an increasingly important weapon in the business arsenal.

The EACS Business Intelligence workshops are filling up fast so to register your interest then click here.

Currently most IT staff are still employed to “keep the lights on”: Gartner’s prediction is that by 2010 externally managed IT services will be the largest part of the IT market leaving IT Staff free to add value through their knowledge of business needs instead of fire fighting.