Last week I attended the 2011 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference held this year in Los Angeles from July 10th till 14th. More than 15,000 attendees from 130 countries had the possibility to network, build connections and share best practices.

The theme was Winning Together and the announcements made at WPC were:

Cloud: After two years in the market Windows Azure has established itself as a robust cloud platform and has achieved Microsoft’s Cloud Plans. With Microsoft there is a good interaction between public and private cloud. Microsoft is trying to immerse companies in its internal platform with Active Directory and System Center these are the foundations for the private cloud.

System Center: Apart from managing your virtual environment with Hyper-V, there’s a new feature that allows you to manage your VMware implementations also. System Center will allow you to also view your Azure environment.

Denali: Microsoft’s next-generation SQL Server database management system was released. Read more here.

Bing: It will add a user’s social networking friends shared results and it will be integrated to include more Microsoft applications.

Crescent: There was a demo of this reporting service BI tool which allows users to interact and create reports from data. It has great interactivity, visualization, browser based experience, immediate and fast. It includes story boarding, the ability to take snapshot of a state of the report. You can export it to power point. It can be linked to Azure DataMarket.

Windows 8: The goal for this operating system is to run on different devices with ARM processors. And it will be compatible with Windows 7.

Regarding the presentations, I enjoyed David Chappell session, Windows Azure and its Competitors: Comparing Cloud Platforms. Excellent tips to know why Windows Azure is different from the alternatives such as Amazon Web Services, Google AppEngine and the rest.

I ran into Per Werngren from Australia whose session was Partner-to-Partner Networking: Partnering Maturity Model – Roadmap to Higher Profits and Increased Customer Satisfaction.

In Steve Fox’s Azure and the SI Partner we learned how we can create business from Sharepoint. It was really interesting!

It was great meeting many folks from the Microsoft team. Thanks for all the help! Carolina Uzcategui, Niraj Nagrani, Peter Zalkind, JD Sutton, Eleni Rachaniotou, Steve Fox, Mike Rogers, Itai Raz, Kari L. Franson, Javier Baeza, Elisa Flasko, Paul Cunnington and Colin Nurse.

It was cool to hang out with Ernesto Abarca from Alphapeople and the Group from Costa Rica and I had great conversations with Sergio Oliveira from LanLink Brazil, Jeff Collard from Omnivex, Carsten Halfman from Amball, Bill Cava from Ektron, Elias Mereb from Widetech, Edvinas Maciulis from Blue Bridge, Luis Aburto from Scio and Al Perez from Total Computer Group.