In case you've been living under a rock for the last year, Microsoft executives spoke the company's going-forwardstrategy loud and clear: Cloud, and devices. It also announced the next version of Windows Phone 7, codenamed Mango, will be out late in the year, around the holiday season.

Robert Wahbe, Microsoft vice president and head of the Server and Tools Division, reminded the attendees (who numbered in the thousands for the keynote) that "people expect data from the business to be available on the device they want, optimized for that device, with security, control and visibility." During his presentaiton, he showed the run rate for physical servers at 7.8 million, but for virtual servers, it was 10.7 million. This sets up for the next, bigger inflection point, which he said is the cloud -- "taking virtualized resources and pulling them together for dynamic provisioning and scaling."

Microsoft, he said, offers the broadest public cloud offering, with Windows Azure and SQL Azure, as well as Office 365 productivity suite, Dynamics CRM and Windows Intune for management. For private clouds, Microsfot offers Windows Server Hyper-V and System Center, which Wahbe said is the base infrastructure to run the workloads business need, including their own servers and custom applications. Microsoft provides the common elements across identity, virtualization, management and deployment for either public or private clouds, he said.

As for devices, Wahbe showed a stat that showed in 2011, the average number of connected devices per adult is 4.3. Projected smartphone growht between 2011 and 2014 is 81 percent he said, and as industry, more smartphones than PCs are shipping now -- 453 millino to 372 million. The

Microsoft demonstrated access of Office 365 from the phone, with Lync Light offering secure communication via email (Outlook and Exchange) and support for IRM for protected emails.

Finally, Kinect technology was displayed as a way to bring computing power into places it hasn't been, such as third-world health clinics, where ultrasounds can be performed using inexpensive tablet devices, and operating rooms, where surgeons can manipulate CT images without affecting the sterile environment in which they work.