NEWS: An international success

Thousands of IT professionals, developers, system architects and technical decision makers attended this year’s Microsoft Tech.Ed South-East Asia show.

THE annual Tech.Ed SEA conference attracted 3,200 attendees with a marked increase in foreign participants.

One quarter of this year’s ­attendees are from the region, an increase from 20% last year, ­according to Tyson Dowd, Microsoft Malaysia senior director for Malaysian software economy.

PACKED:Many participants flew in from neighbouring countries like Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia just to attend Tech.Ed 2008.

“We had people from Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia flying down to Kuala Lumpur just for Tech.Ed. This is thanks to the awareness we built over the last few years,” he said.

He said that attendees place a lot of value in attending Tech.Ed because the event gives them a chance to get a hands on feel of Microsoft’s products.

“Getting to attend Tech.Ed is like a reward for a job well done, as they get to meet the experts,” he said.

Tech.Ed took nine months to organise and overall, Microsoft is satisfied with the results. “It was like having a baby,” he said.

Dowd said that the highlight of the event were the tracks on virtualisation, as Microsoft is offering Hyper-V with Windows server 2008.

Virtualisation has in recent years become an increasingly popular method for companies to reduce hardware requirement by running two or more virtual machines on a single server.

This is more environmentally friendly because by reducing the number of physical machines, companies will also see a reduction in power consumption.

“If you’re an IT person, virtualisation will change your life,” he claimed.

Most participants interviewed by In.Tech said that they attended at least 12 sessions during the intense, information-packed four-day event and found the conference to be very useful.

Nazhar Nizam, Bank Rakyat Sdn Bhd’s executive for IT infrastructure management, was upbeat on the Hyper-V virtualisation technology because it can help optimise server resources.

“We definitely want to upgrade to it as soon as possible,” said Nazhar, a first time Tech.Ed attendee.

Rick Salisbury, product ­development manager of Melbourne-based Ultradata Pte Ltd, a supplier of IT ­services to the financial sector, found the mobile development tracks the most interesting.

“I believe there are twice as many mobile phone as there are PCs in the world, and the mobile world hasn’t reached its potential yet. It’s interesting to see how mobile ­applications will evolve in two years time,” he said.

Another first-timer at Tech.Ed, Ismail Hussin, an assistant manager of group risk and information ­security at AmBank Group, said that learning about Microsoft’s Systems Centre was an educational experience.

Systems Centre is a complete suite of solutions for managing a server farm.

“We have 400 servers and Systems Centre gives a bird’s eye view of what’s on them,” he said.

Siti Nabilah Ibrahim, an executive at Petronas Nasional Bhd’s research and technology division, said she gained a deeper understanding of Sharepoint, a networking and ­collaboration software, which was initially deployed for her department of 8,000 people.

Over the next six years, her team is looking at deploying Sharepoint for 33,000 Petronas employees.

“Besides the tracks, I also found the labs a great help as it gave my team a chance to learn from the experts,” she said.