Microsoft at Solutions Linux 2013

Posted by Frédéric Aatz
Director of Interoperability Strategy, Microsoft France

Recently 6,000 participants gathered in Paris to participate in the fifteenth annual Solutions Linux event, which brings together many businesses and open source communities to share emerging best practices and discuss IT market trends.

This was Microsoft’s ninth year participating in the event, this year as a gold sponsor. It was an excellent opportunity for us to connect with a broad range of companies and individuals who are focused on open source solutions and interoperability for enterprises with mixed IT environments.

During my keynote, I had the opportunity to highlight how Microsoft has evolved to become more open as a company, working with our customers and the open source ecosystem to better support interoperability. Windows Azure Mobile Services support for multiple mobile platforms, like iOS and Android, and Microsoft’s support for a range of hybrid cloud scenarios as part of our Cloud OS strategy particularly piqued interest.

Philippe Desmaison from SUSE and Alfonso Castro of Microsoft’s Open Solutions Group joined me onstage to highlight our joint efforts to help customers with interoperability solutions. For several years now, Microsoft and SUSE have worked together to deliver unified solutions, integrated tools, and first-class support for mixed Windows and Linux environments, supporting interoperability from the datacenter to the cloud.

According to Castro “More than 1,000 customers have benefited from the Microsoft and SUSE alliance, helping enterprises move forward by providing choice and delivering significant value to our mutual customers.”

You can watch Solutions Linux’s complete interview with me and Castro here (in French), discussing how Microsoft is working open source solutions, particularly in the Cloud.  

Panel discussions at this event always spark spirited debate on industry trends, as well as good feedback on our product roadmaps. One panel focused on big data challenges and the role of great open source solutions like Hadoop.

Damien Cudel of Microsoft France shared our big data roadmap, including efforts to democratize big data with HDInsight, Microsoft’s 100% Apache compatible Hadoop distribution that is supported by Microsoft and available both on Windows Server and as a Windows Azure service. According to one audience member “With the HDInsight service it is very simple to setup a Hadoop cluster in just a few minutes.”

You can also watch Solutions Linux’s complete interview with Cudel here (in French), reviewing Microsoft’s work to deliver big data solutions with Hadoop and Hortonworks.

Another panel focused on the rise of the HTML5 and other standards in modern web development, making it an increasingly credible alternative to native applications, especially for mobile and cross-platform scenarios. Olivier Bloch of Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. participated in the discussion, highlighting his group’s efforts to deliver seamless “just works” experiences, working with open source communities like JQuery, WebKit, Web Platform Docs, and many others to help web developers leverage their existing skills, code and tools.

This year’s Solutions Linux was packed with great discussions about how we can continue to support our customers with solutions that blend the best of open source and commercial technologies. Have any favorite moments from the event? Please share them in the comments below.

We hope to see you next year! In the meantime, you can follow me on twitter @faatz or via my blog.