Then there are other functions where, quite honestly, we have partners in the enterprise, Accenture or EDS or others, that have more expertise with certain line-of-business applications or certain operational elements. And we're going to enable our technologies so they can be partner-hosted by those partners.

Then there's the third model where we have lots of big customers coming to us right now saying 'for this type of user, for these applications, whether it's Exchange or Outlook or Sharepoint, we want Microsoft to host it.'

If you look at what Salesforce is doing right now, or Google's application suite, their model is you let us host it or there's no software as a service.

Our model is build around thinking that customers are going to want us to host two our of those three or three out of those three areas and we want to be sure we enable that.

As people come to us about managing the desktop or Exchange, that will free up time, money and resources for the IT department to put more IQ, more deliberate, intentional IQ on the ability to differentiate in their business model.

Q: Users and analyst surveys are saying there aren't enough trained virtualization specialists out there in the marketplace. What has Microsoft been doing to change that?

Turner: We've trained more than 500,000 people in the last 10 months in our Heroes Happen Now launch program in the marketplace. When we talk about lower total cost of ownership, training and management and licensing are all elements of that. But training is certainly one of those areas that is within our reach and I feel great about where we are with that.

That was one of the most successful [training rollouts] we've ever done, and with this virtualization launch we're going to do it again; we're hitting the marketplace with it a second time as we do the launch in different places around the world.

© 2009 CXO Media Inc.