Russ: This is the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at theBusinessMakers.com. It's now time for some more cool information from Microsoft 'cause once again I have Jennifer Heard, Vice President of Microsoft. Welcome back once again.

Jennifer: Thank you. Great to be here --

Russ: You bet. And today I understand we're gonna be talking about how it's really a whole new world for a small business actually looking professional and like a large business. Share that topic with our audience.

Jennifer: I would love to share that topic. It is so exciting. Ya' know, I've been in technology for a long time, 20 plus years and I've never seen the evolution of technology at the rate it's been and the fact that a small business, a company in the past would have to spend a lot of money with IT resources, hardware, software, technology to deliver simple solutions --

Russ: Right.

Jennifer: -- like e-mail or portal technologies in a secure way for their business. And in - not to mention to try to bring their business global because we are an international business now -

Russ: Absolutely.

Jennifer: The fact that they can do that with the swipe of a credit card and have access to enterprise class technologies is so exciting. We're gonna start to see businesses spin up innovation, be able to deliver their business in a whole new way with technology today.

Russ: Okay. Describe that a bit more in detail, Jennifer. Let's say I've got a small company and I - I just had this idea and it's kind of an e-commerce site in operation. How would I do that? I mean, who would I call and how would I get started?

Jennifer: Well we actually have an incredible offer today for a small business. Go to Microsoft.com's website and you can just hit Microsoft.com/cloud and that'll take you to the links to get your business started. You can get into the small business settings and set up a cloud offering. Just pay by the month and by the use and you can get e-mail, you can get a portal. The portal will give you the capability to post documents and post information for other businesses to even connect to if they needed. This is the opportunity to now bring the technology that only an enterprise used to be able to deliver and bring that to a small business at a very, very low cost.

Russ: Okay.

Jennifer: Enabling them to now have an e-mail, have a website, have a secured way to collaborate and communicate, whether it's local or international.

Russ: Okay. And so Microsoft is actually connecting small businesses to the cloud and offering these services through the cloud.

Jennifer: That's correct and so they can take the properties that they already know. Let's say they already use Office 2010, the productivity tools.

Russ: Right.

Jennifer: Now they extend that to reach out into the cloud to do collaboration, to be able to securely communicate, things that are important to their business and to their customers. And the other thing that's great about what we're offering is the ability to now see that infrastructure, that if they're managing the infrastructure today onsite, let's say they've built a server, now they want to scale out a data warehouse.

Russ: Right.

Jennifer: If you want to build a data warehouse, that's a million dollars a square foot. Small businesses can't afford to do that. So why not pay a subscription and have access to that million dollars a square foot from a company like Microsoft that already has that experience. We have a proven world class scale data center that people may not realize, but we host over 500 million IDs. There's no other company in the world that has that many active users that are being managed in an infrastructure in a data warehouse. So Microsoft has that ability to scale and manage. The other thing that's really exciting is think about that data warehouse and we have the ability now if you have built an app in your small business and you wanna take advantage of that data warehouse to be able to scale out terabytes of data, don't have to build that yourself anymore, that million dollars a square foot.

Russ: Right.

Jennifer: You just bring a credit card, swipe it and Microsoft can take that information and scale it as great as you want and we can manage it, we'll back it and we'll have the ability to demonstrate those technologies only an enterprise would've been able to do in the past.

Russ: Seems kind of interesting to me that Microsoft is offering these cloud solutions, too, because you are so big already on what I would call the in-house solutions and the data that I host and keep right in my own site. So it would be sort of a unique combination there it seems like to me.

Jennifer: It is because the fact that you have access to that infrastructure that we've built to connect users globally, you think about how much that would take a small business to do.

Russ: Right.

Jennifer: So you bring that experience along with our enterprise experience and the consumer experience and you bring that world together and now whether you wanna connect to that information from your Windows phone 7 or another smart phone device or a PC browser or even a, ya' know, a desktop or a laptop that's on the road. This gives the small business the comfort that they can get to their information anywhere, anytime and from any device.

Russ: Real cool. Jennifer, I really appreciate you sharing this with us.

Jennifer: It's been great to be able to share with you. Thanks for having me.

Russ: You bet. That's Jennifer Heard, Vice President with Microsoft and you're listening to the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at the BusinessMakers.com.