Welcome to TechEd

Microsoft welcomes 10,000 attendees to TechEd 2012, the 20th annual edition of the company’s largest conference for users of Microsoft products. This year, Microsoft hosted the show at the Orlando Convention Center.

Satya Nadella, president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, kicks off TechEd North America 2012 with a keynote about moving to the cloud.

Nadella calls Windows the Cloud OS, signaling the company’s willingness to change its philosophy and attitude toward the evolving technologies, such as cloud, which Microsoft had previously resisted.

Microsoft said the cloud requires new hardware abstraction plus a modern data center and modern apps.

Microsoft said the modern data center must run converged systems with large-scale compute, storage and networking capabilities.

Running in the cloud requires running services at Internet scale, which Microsoft’s Windows Server 2012 and Windows Azure enable, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft says the modern data center must have four things: scalability, availability, shared resources and automation.

Jeff Woolsey, Microsoft’s principal program manager for Windows Server Virtualization, talks about the technological virtues of Windows Server 2012.

Woolsey shared this slide with attendees to show the memory usage and other aspects of Windows Server 2012.

Woolsey shows the throughput of a typical Windows Server 2012 virtualized environment through this dashboard.

Windows Azure enables users to have a data center without boundaries, according to Microsoft.

Mark Russinovich, a technical fellow in the Windows Azure group at Microsoft, talks about the power of Windows Azure.

Aflac, the insurance company, uses Windows Azure for agility, flexibility and performance.

Mike Boyle, the CIO of Aflac, joins Russinovich onstage during the TechEd 2012 keynote to discuss how the company uses Windows Azure and its plans for the cloud in the future.

Microsoft says Windows Azure is the right fit for its definition of a modern data center.

Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the Azure App Platform at Microsoft, demonstrates how easy it is to write apps for Windows Azure.

Jason Zander, corporate vice president of Visual Studio, talks about building apps for ARM-based devices, such as the tablet he holds here.

Here’s an example of a tablet app built using Microsoft’s Visual Studio.

Microsoft says modern apps require modern access and device management.

The next release of Windows Intune includes expanded management and security benefits through mobile-device management and adds people-centric management capabilities and upgrade rights to the latest version of Windows.

The world is moving to data-powered apps.

Amir Netz, a Microsoft technical fellow in the SQL Server group, talks about how SQL Server handles data in the modern data center.

At the TechEd 2012 Day 1 post-keynote press conference, Amy Barzdukas, (far right) general manager of communications for the Microsoft Server and Tools Business unit, hosts (from right to left) Mike Boyle, CIO of Aflac, Satya Nadella, President of the Microsoft Server and Tools Business, and Jerry Schulist, an enterprise architect for the Tribune Company.

Microsoft displays the TechEd North America 2012 logo as the Day One keynote comes to an end.