A Recap of MMS 2010

[Re-blog of the original post on the BIEB blog portal]

MMS 2010, which ran April 19th-23rd in Las Vegas, was voted by its attendees (up 51% over last year) as one of the most successful conferences of the series!  Many thanks to all who attended, and to our sponsors (including our platinum sponsors Dell, Hitachi and HP), for making this event such a success!

To kick off day 1 and day 2 of the event, we saw great attendance (and scores) at our keynotes:

• Day 1: Managing Systems from the Datacenter to the Cloud with Bob Muglia (watch the day 1 keynote here)
• Day 2: User Centric Client Management with Brad Anderson (watch the day 2 keynote here)

At the keynotes, attendees were treated to many exciting announcements, including:

• Announcement of System Center Service Manager 2010
• Announcement of System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 (and System Center Essentials 2010)
• Release of System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R3

[Congratulations to Brad Anderson who scored one of the highest keynote scores in MMS history!  If you’re intrigued to see what happens behind stage, check out this blog.]

Throughout the event itself was delivered of a wide range of fantastic and new content to attendees through:

• 140 breakout sessions
• 15 Birds-Of-a-Feather sessions
• 75 Instructor-Led-Labs (taken by a total of 7,131 attendees)
• 71 self-driven labs
• 14 Focus Groups

Overall, all content received fantastic scores from our attendees, so thanks to all our speakers and those who assisted behind-the-scenes!

A new approach at MMS 2010 was in the delivery of our lab.  This year the team took an innovate approach, where all of the labs were hosted virtually using Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V running on HP hardware, and managed using System Center.

Using this setup through the week over 40,000 VMs were delivered from 41 physical HP server  hosts to 650 thin clients! (Read this entry on the Virtualization Team Blog to find out more about how we did it, and the fantastic results of this innovative new setup!).

Microsoft teams also engaged on different social media efforts, and during the week of MMS saw some great results:

• The event Twitter hashtag #mms2010 saw over 3000 tweets.
• Our System Center Facebook presence grew by 20%.
• Over 59,000 views of blogs relating to MMS 2010.
• Jeff Wettlaufer’s MMS preview video with Brad Anderson drew 70,000 viewers, and my video introducing Service Manager 2010 generated 21,000 views.

While the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano did affect a number of attendees and speakers who were located in Europe, we heard some fantastic stories from those who managed to make it to Vegas (read this blog covering one such journey from London to Vegas). 

If you missed us at MMS 2010, we hope to see you at one of the other events we’ll be at this year (including TechEd US 2010, TechEd Africa 2010 and TechEd Europe 2010).

With that, we start to prepare for MMS 2011…

Sacha Dawes, CISSP
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center Solutions for Dynamic Datacenters