The official MTC web site describes the MTC as:

"Microsoft Technology Centers (MTCs) provide everything you need — technology experts, industry leaders, and an outstanding environment — to envision, architect, and demonstrate a secure, customized solution, based on Microsoft and partner technologies. "

There are 8 of these centers in the US and another 8 outside the US. The centers mainly work with large enterprise customers to help them envision, design, plan, and validate their IT architecture for new (mostly) and existing initiatives. It's a really interesting place to work at for several reasons.

First, the people - from the management teams (small and agile), to the architects, to the supporting staff, are all people with heavy duty experience. Because of their experience and the types of positions they've held in the past, they like challenges and are genuinely interested in the customer's needs - they dig deep into the issues and offer outstanding value.

Secondly, because of the demands of the roles in the MTCs, there is the need to be up to date and deep on the technologies they support. With so many people with such depth in different areas, there is fluid collaboration between the architects - so when a customer comes in and a question comes up around a technology that is not the expertise domain of the architect working with the customer - no problem, they can leverage the right person. That's a difficult thing to pull off in most organizations.

Thirdly, being Microsoft you would imagine that there would be plenty of software at your disposal - and there is - but you do need hardware too. The MTCs work with their partners to assure that there is plenty of hardware of the caliber that you would find in the data centers of the largest companies in the world. Servers, storage, appliances, networking - you name it. Not to mention the software and services partners that also make their wares and skills available. Our partners are there when we need them to interact with the customers when appropriate and answer the tough questions. When the architectures get real, we can step up and provide the foundation to prove the solutions - this is a really important aspect of what we offer, nobody wants their project to fail - we help by proving that the tough spots can be done.

Lastly, the knowledge and insight we gain from interacting with our customers gives us a really good sense of what is going on in the technology industry - even what is going on technologically in other industries. If we were consultants, we would have a bit of a narrower view since our time with each customer would be longer (we'd have more depth in that customer's experience though) so we would see far fewer of them. At the MTC we spend a shorter time (days to weeks) but often also keep contact with the teams implementing the solutions, and we do see the same customers again for other initiatives - all this rolls up to some great insights on needs, trends, and whats on the minds of businesses and IT orgs across sectors.

So, what is this blog for? (finally, right!) The architects at the MTC in New York City thought it would be valuable to talk about the trends we're seeing in our particular ares of interest, as well as the greater spectrum of Microsoft technologies - as a video PodCast. We're calling this the MTC Technology Briefing PodCast. Currently its not available as a PodCast, but rather embedded video (Using SilverLight and SilverLight Streaming) - but that will be coming soon.

We'll talk about both the Microsoft Technology Center and the technology we're using to produce this video PodCast in future blog entries (and in the PodCast). A brief explanation of the PodCasts format is: A) We are currently using the Microsoft RoundTable video conferencing camera and Microsoft LiveMeeting to do the recordings; B) We're editing the video using Camtasia, and encoding into SilverLight using the Expression Encoder; C) We're uploading the content to the SilverLight Streaming service; and D) We're embedding the video in our MSDN blog that is built on Telligent's Community Server product.

The PodCasts format is to cover the areas of specially of the participants briefly to see what's on their mind - then delve deeper on a particular issue for the balance of the episode. We're looking to make this a 15 minute experience on a weekly basis. Now that the stage is set, let's see if we can follow through and make this real and regular.

If you have suggestions, please leave a comment.