The EEC, which is located in building 25 near the center of Microsoft’s Redmond, WA corporate campus, is supported by an infrastructure that contains over 600 servers, more than 2 Petabytes of storage and a central switching fabric of over 20 Terabytes. The facility houses seven customer labs, 3 private conference rooms and a technical briefing center which customers and partners can utilize to accomplish their engagement goals.

A significant expansion project was completed in July 2009 to enhance the facility’s capacity and capabilities while increasing energy efficiency and, more importantly, provide the metering and tools to measure increasing levels of overall solution efficiencies.

The EEC is uniquely suited to host several different types of events, ranging from deployment testing to training to executive briefings, but the main focus is on empowering customers so they can validate enterprise solutions and deploy them quicker in their estates.

The most common type of event at the EEC is a Depth Customer Engagement. These typically last 2 weeks, with a 6-8 week lead time so the EEC personnel can assure that the customer’s environment is ready for them when they arrive.

The focus of each engagement varies based on the requirements of each company and their testing goals, but all customers are able to have discussions with Microsoft’s development teams. During these collaborative sessions, customers can talk about their future scenarios, business needs and how our software and services can meet them.