Posted by Geoff Sullivan
Managing Sales Director, Open Solutions Group

As you may have heard, the recently released Ubuntu 12.04 LTS has been engineered with the drivers needed to run on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. We are pleased to support customers running Ubuntu on Hyper-V in their virtualized and cloud infrastructure.

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

There is a vast amount of data available today that is being collected and stored at an unprecedented rate.  Market demand is growing for easy access to this data across multiple platforms and devices. The move to cloud computing is also increasing pressure to create a more open and programmable Web by having a common approach to expose and consume data. To help address this demand, Citrix, IBM, Microsoft, Progress Software, SAP, and WSO2 announced last week that they are proposing an Open Data Protocol (OData) Technical Committee in the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), an international open standards consortium. 

Posted by James Utzschneider
General Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

We use this blog to talk about Microsoft’s approach to Openness and our investments in standards, interoperability, and integration with open source software. We do this because we have changed as a company and have become more open. 

Many of our government customers are listening to this and clearly recognize the value we bring in terms of our approach to openness and interoperability.

It has been common practice for government agencies over the last decade to announce the prescriptive use of open source technology as a way to cut costs and deliver better value to citizens while driving innovation and stimulating the local economy.  Some government organizations made large-scale reviews and deployments of open source software, particularly on the desktop, only to find that this approach alone did not provide the expected cost-saving or returns on interoperability or benefits delivered.

At the same time, these agencies saw a Microsoft that was investing heavily in working with open source vendors and communities, in supporting standard document formats like ODF, in building rich integration with Linux on the desktop and the server, and in mainstreaming the new stack of web standards like PHP and HTML5. Many of these agencies realized they could have the best of both worlds and subsequently augmented or even replaced their open source-only deployments with Microsoft technology. They like that we have made a commitment to ensure our technology works well with others combined with the overall platform value we deliver.

I am in Berlin today meeting with members of the German Parliament and speaking at the LinuxTag open source conference. The conversations I am having here reinforce for me that the decisions made by governments around open source were done with the absolute best intentions for their citizens and communities in mind. However real-world experience, combined with a changing Microsoft, have led government leaders to realize that there is now a better way, and governments across Europe including here in Germany are evolving their approach on this topic.

Posted by James Utzschneider
General Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

Microsoft has changed as a company and become more open. This includes building interoperability into our core products that span office productivity and collaboration, cross-platform systems management, and security and identity management.  We’ve made these investments as a result of listening to customers and focusing on helping them meet new and evolving challenges while making it easier and less costly for them to manage their IT environments.  Below is a list of some of these global customers. 

Posted by Sandy Gupta
General Manager, Open Solutions Group

I’m excited to be at the Open Source Business Conference today and to announce that in collaboration with SUSE, and based on our longstanding alliance, we are releasing a beta version of the SUSE Manager Management Pack for System Center. This management pack connects the Linux server management capabilities provided by SUSE Manager to System Center, Microsoft’s management platform. As a result, customers will be able to administer both Windows and Linux environments from a single management console. If you’d like to test out the Linux management capabilities this management pack provides for System Center, you can access it here.