Today was the first day of the first meeting of the Microsoft Interoperability Executive Customer Council. IT leaders from several (30+) of our largest enterprise customers and government agencies from various locations around the world (incl. US, Hong Kong, Brazil, Germany, France, Denmark) - came to Redmond to discuss their view of what interoperability is, what it means to their business, and how they see Microsoft providing effective interoperability to the IT ecosystem.

The discussion was phenomenal – as we already knew, customers are very passionate about the subject of interoperability, and rate it on par with reliability and security in terms of importance. We had a very active dialog with almost 100% participation from all council members in every session and during the panel discussion. We are already getting some great insight that will be extremely valuable in tailoring our interoperability strategy to more appropriately meet our customer's specific needs.

Tomorrow we will continue discussions around several specific scenarios, and dive into additional Microsoft interoperability activity to gain additional perspective.