Last week I had the opportunity to speak at the Association of University Research Parks (AURP) Annual Meeting.  Microsoft was a sponsor of the meeting and I was one of the speakers.  It was a fantastic experience.  I was able to talk to a number of people involved in both the academic and commercial side of research parks. 

My talk was on the future on computing.  I choose not to talk about thousands of processors and terabytes of memory, but on the current discussion of Software as a Service (SaaS).  Interestingly (to me at least) as a prepared for the talk I thought that application as a service might be a better description of what SaaS is.  I also talked about the emerging trend of platform as a Service (PaaS).  I talked about SaaS and PaaS from the context of Microsoft Software + Services (S+S) strategy including Windows Azure.  My talk should be posted on the AURP web site soon.  I believe that companies:

• will choose (on-premise and hosted) by business needs, comfort levels, government regulation, ROI, privacy policy and IT governance standards
• will have BOTH (on-premise and hosted) models with a combination of on premise software as well as applications and platform as services (e.g. S+S)
  

As part of my talk i covered Microsoft BizSpark a global program that deepens Microsoft’s support of startups and organizations that support and nurture startups by providing: Microsoft software (development and production licenses), support and visibility.  There was a noticeable level of excitement that Microsoft was providing a program geared to help startups and their support network.