Microsoft plans to run the keynote . Additional interviews and sessions will be broadcast .

As far as cloud computing, the company will have much to discuss. Over the past few months Microsoft has touted a number of higher-profile customer adoptions. The Target chain of department stores, for instance, now runs 15,000 virtual machines across its retail stores, using Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and System Center. Toyota is using Windows Azure for its next-generation telematics services.

But the company also has had its share of high-profile mistakes. Just this week, users have been from Microsoft's hosted Exchange offering.

Attendees should pay very close attention to how Microsoft details its cloud strategy, advised Charles King, principal analyst for the firm Pund-IT. Like Microsoft itself, companies such as VMware, Red Hat, Rackspace, Google and others have all made significant progress in their cloud software and offerings. "How does Microsoft think its approach is better than the competitors?" he said.

"If you've watched Microsoft over the last year or so, and all the reorganizations, it looks like they may be heading more quickly to the cloud than they were a few years ago," Trent said.