The Microsoft Dynamics CRM team was invited by Intel to participate at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco last week. IDF is Intel’s largest annual technology conference, and this was the CRM team’s initial invitation to attend. The invitation was a direct result of the strong relationship that we have established with them, as well as the success of the 50,000 user CRM4 benchmark that the CRM E2 team published a couple of months ago.
In the Intel Server Zone, we presented a live CRM demo that included using the CRM Performance Toolkit to generate load on the system. Our demo was also combined with the Intel Node Manager tool to demonstrate the performance impact of regulating power to the servers to get the optimal Price per Performance. The demo was extremely well received, and both the Intel staff and various hardware and software vendors (including SAP) expressed a lot of interest. To keep this brief, I have summarized my thoughts and impressions from the conference below.
- 50,000 concurrent users is a big number!
- I was approached many times by both Intel staff and external companies to explain the benchmarking efforts and my impression was that people were generally surprised to see us be such a prominent player in the enterprise space.
- Virtualization
- The conference was dominated by cloud computing and virtualization. The was some particularly interesting work presented by LSI around IO virtualization.
- It’s all about the power of choice
- The Dynamics CRM power of choice (Online vs. On-Premises) and choice of clients (Web vs. Outlook vs. Outlook Offline) were very interesting to the Intel team.
- (and on a personal note) 3D TV is amazing!
- The next gen of 3D TVs do a pretty stunning job of creating 3-D images from a 2-D video stream using the latest Intel chips and middleware.
- http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=24880
The conference was a great success for Microsoft overall, and just another step toward establishing our rightful place within the enterprise.
Cheers,