This is the press release released today about my program's expansion - very good news

REDMOND, Wash. – June 11, 2008 – Microsoft Corp. today announced the final approval of the expansion of The Enterprise Engineering Center, Microsoft’s premier customer facing test facility. This new expansion will:
• Double the data center capacity to accommodate growing demand from our partners to showcase their latest products and technologies, facilitate our growing charter, allow for even greater scale up / scale out scenario testing.
• Enhance data center instrumentation to support green data center testing initiatives.
• Addition of storage specific data center – “SAN Alley”, which will contain all of the EEC’s enterprise storage assets, allowing us to meet rapidly growing customer and partner demand for larger arrays.
• Create two new technology focused data centers
o Virtualization – this new Solution Lab will be a showcase facility for Microsoft and our partners, dedicated full time to virtualization and related technologies
o Unified Communications – A new technology showcase with a fully functioning, end-to-end Unified Communications installation. This will allow our customers and partners to do more extensive, real-world testing on UC as well as broaden other testing to include UC for a deeper exposure of how this new initiative can work in their environments.
• Expand existing High Performance Computing (HPC) test cluster
o The EEC, together with Hewlett Packard and Intel, is adding a second HPC cluster to meet growing demand. This 80-node, 640-core cluster will be moved into dedicated space in the expanded data center for both onsite and remote customer use.
• New conference and training center
o The EEC is doubling the size of the Conference Center enabling new events such as training, seminars, and joint or partner led activities.

Schedule – construction is scheduled to begin in September, 2008 with completion and grand re-opening events March, 2009.

For more information or questions about how you as a partner can be involved, please contact Steve Cole, EEC Partner Manager at 425-704-9291 or Steven.Cole@microsoft.com