Microsoft’s premier and flagship IT event, Teched North America 2011, kicked off today with they “day 1 keynote”. Around 15 minutes before the keynote started, two DJ’s were on stage playing ‘Daft Punk / Tron’ alike music. Quite a change for Microsoft to start off their keynote this way, but the crowd loved it!

Microsoft executive Robert Wahbe started the keynote by noting that over 10,000 attendees are here representing 84 countries and that Teched this year offers 551 sessions and over 250 hands-on labs. The general theme for the keynote is about the consumerization of IT, where people carry multiple devices and expect to be connected everywhere, having their data available (through the cloud).

Robert rolled a video about a new solution under development from a partner where a medical device is connected to a Windows 7 tablet to perform ultrasounds. Images are stored in Windows Azure, and easily accessible. Due to the lower costs, ultrasound could come available in countries where today they wouldn’t have that. (more)

He continued his talk by showing that the move from physical to virtual to cloud is really here. In his slide he showed IDC numbers that tell us that the number of virtualized servers has now superseded the physical servers and that an IT management solution is more than ever necessary to manage this. He showed the audience that Microsoft today has a broad range of public cloud offerings: Windows Azure, Office 365, Dynamics CRM online and Windows InTune. He also showed that you today can build your private cloud using Hyper-V, System Center and Windows Server. Robert outlined that both private and public cloud have a need for common identity, common virtualization, common management and a common development platform.

After a video on Travelocity, where Microsoft showed how they use Windows Azure to scale out using public cloud, Joey Snow was asked on stage. Joey demonstrated how System Center 2012 can help to manage both the private and public cloud. Joey showed the new System Center Service Manager 2012 self-service website where he could request computing capacity from both Azure as well as Hyper-V on-premise. He then went on to System Center Orchestrator 2012 (formerly: Opalis) to show how an actually “runbook” does the work to provision the requested capacity. Finally he switched to System Center codename “Concero” where he could manage both the Azure as well as the private cloud workloads.

Next, Amir Netz was asked on stage to demo Microsoft’s new Business Intelligence capabilities in Office 2010 and SQL 2008 R2. After showing Powerpivot in Excel 2010, he announced that Project “crescent” will be shipped along with the new SQL Server release called “Denali“.

Robert Wahbe returned to stage to outline more numbers that show us the consumerization of IT: Americans have on average 4.3 connected devices. There are 453 million smartphone devices, somewhat than 100M more than there are PC’s in the US! Augusto Valdez was asked to stage to show a preview of codename “Mango“, the next release of Windows phone, which will be released towards the end of this year. Augusto showed the new Lync Mobile client, the new Outlook capabilties such as ‘conversations’, ‘IRM integration’ and the new Office 365 integration where he opened a document from his phone directly.

After this, Robert continued that Microsoft has a full cross-platform solution for management in store in the next few months: System Center Configuration Manager 2012 will be able to manage other platforms than Microsoft devices such as iOS and Android. Edwin Yuen was asked to stage to demo Kinect capabilities using Microsoft Research’s project “Worldwide Telescope“ where they collaborated with NASA and ESA. Edwin was able to use his hands to “navigate” through our Universe and pivot around our planets and solar system!

Next up was Jason Zander, corporate vice president of Visual Studio. He demo’d a scenario on stage where a Services company was able to inform on-route engineers on assignments using the new Azure and Windows Phone toolkit. Jason continued to show that Visual Studio 2010 is a strong release, enabling Windows Phone development and also introducing “Lightswitch” to the product lineup allowing you to easily create LOB apps for your data in a robust way.

Jason announced Visual Studio vNext “application lifecycle management”. Cameron Skinner was asked to stage to demo bits and pieces of Visual Studio vNext. The first thing he showed is the Storyboarding Assistent that uses Powerpoint to mockup requirements to your application. The second thing is the web-based Dashboard coming to Team Foundation Server called “TFS Web Access” where he could add work items to the project etc.

After this, Viktor Mushkatin was asked to stage to demo the new Avicode capabilities of System Center Operations Manager; where he drilled down into the application errors. Viktor announced the new Visual Studio connector for System Center Operations Manager where he could assign OpsMgr Alerts as work items in Visual Studio, for developers to follow up on these problems. The connector CTP is available today.

Jason closed the keynote by noting that Teched North America 2012 will be in Orlando Florida next year!

Stay tuned while Techlog will cover Teched North America 2011 the coming hours and days! Both on our blog as through twitter..