At the IT Forum that is taking place this week in Barcelona we announced a a couple of products to enhance business computing. These products were disclosed by Bob Muglia in the key note in front of more than 3000 IT Professionals from around Europe.

The most important announcement according to my personal opinion are:

• Microsoft® Exchange Server “12,” Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, Windows Server™ “Longhorn” Small Business Server, and Microsoft’s infrastructure solution for midsize businesses, code-named “Centro,” will be exclusively 64-bit and optimized for x64 hardware.
  This is inline with our commitment to 64-bit computing and show our commitment to 64-bit computing. These products are following a host of other products that are already available for 64-bit such as SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and Virtual Server 2005 R2
• Virtual Server 2005 R2 has been released to manufacturing and will be available in volume licensing and retail from first week of December
• Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 Beta 2 is now publicly available. Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 is a 64-bit solution designed to accelerate time to insight by offering a high-performance computing (HPC) platform that is simple to deploy, operate and integrate with existing infrastructure and tools.
• December RTM of System Center Capacity Planner 2006, which brings an unprecedented level of functionality and flexibility to the process of performance analysis and planning of Exchange Server 2003 and Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 system deployments.
• Availability of Windows Desktop Search enabled for enterprise deployment

Stay tuned, more information will follow.