Wave of new Microsoft Enterprise products to be showcased across the Gulf

Together with its partners in the region such as HP, Intel, IBM, Dell and Quest Software, the 6-city roadshow will commence in Abu Dhabi on March 10, 2008 followed by Kuwait (Mar 12), Bahrain (Mar 17), Qatar (Mar 19), Oman (Mar 23) and will end in Dubai (Mar 27).

The roadshows are intended to unveil Microsoft's next-generation products and demonstrate their world-class features and functionality to customers and partners in the region.

The launch represents a major milestone to help customers on the road to Dynamic IT, Microsoft's initiative to help customers optimize their people, processes and technology and in turn position IT as a strategic asset for their business.

These new enterprise products help customers more efficiently and securely manage their entire infrastructure and move to a virtualized environment.

The theme of the events, 'Heroes Happen Here,' highlights the outstanding work that IT professionals, developers and partners do every day to create solutions and cutting-edge applications that keep global commerce and industry running.

Charbel Fakhoury, General Manager, Microsoft Gulf said, 'The series of roadshows demonstrates Microsoft's long-standing commitment to our customers and partners in the Middle East.

The essence of the tour is to showcase the new products and what makes them the most powerful platforms that a business needs to achieve significant productivity and efficiency benefit along with a dynamic technology infrastructure. This is the largest enterprise launch in our history and both Microsoft and several of our industry partners are making significant investments in a worldwide rollout.'

The 6-city tour will feature high-level guest speakers from Microsoft's global executive team along with leading technology vendors such Intel and HP who will be present at the seminars to discuss their strategic alliance with Microsoft.

Ferhad Patel, Intel's Regional Market Development Manager for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa said, 'The combination of Intel server processors and Microsoft's operating systems, promises dramatic new capabilities.

Multi-core Intel server processors offer breakthrough performance and energy efficiency for implementations of all sizes.

With Windows products running on multi-core Intel processor-based servers, businesses can now maximize control over their IT infrastructure while providing unprecedented business agility and IT productivity.

This enables customers to better manage their environments and computing infrastructure by reducing many challenges they face today.'

Fawwaz Qaddan, Enterprise Storage & Servers Director, HP Middle East said, 'HP and Microsoft have a longstanding relationship that includes collaborative product engineering and development that equips customers with high-quality and cost-effective solutions. Supporting the 'Heroes Happen Here' launch is very important for us, demonstrating once again how our ongoing collaboration gives our customers the confidence to easily and efficiently use HP server hardware with Microsoft software.'

The seminars will also detail how the launch wave will help technology professionals and developers deliver next generation web and business applications, manage IT environments for scale and security and take advantage of virtualization to increase operational agility.

Technology professionals and developers around the world are already using Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and test versions of SQL Server 2008 to implement more secure platforms and Web applications while reducing costs and speeding development.