CIO.com recently published an article describing four key enterprise trends that were helping to shape Microsoft's strategic direction and their future product offerings.  Microsoft's COO Kevin Turner also aludes to how Microsoft will spend $7 billion in its R&D department.

The first is businesses' growing interest in virtualization. "It's not a trend," Turner says of virtualization, "but a theme." And that theme relates to cost savings using virtualization tools, such as Microsoft's Hyper V product. (See Microsoft Releases Beta of Hyper-V Virtualization Tools.) Though there are a couple of different areas where Microsoft is building out its nascent application and desktop virtualization offerings, server virtualization is where it's focusing most of its efforts in a bid to unseat market leader VMware.

The second important market trend is the rise of on-demand or software-as-a-service applications. Microsoft calls its new offerings in this area as "software plus services," and Turner says that Microsoft's move into this space is because customers are demanding it. (For more information, see Microsoft Buys into the Cloud and Microsoft Launches On-Demand CRM Software into a Crowded Market.)

"People want choice," Turner says. "We believe that most large customers will have a variety of business models that relate to software, and there are some bits of their information that they won't want [someone else] to host or control." For those that companies want a third-party to host, Microsoft or its partners are already or will soon be offering to host a multitude of Microsoft products and services (such as Office, Dynamics CRM, Exchange or SharePoint) on its servers.

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Read the rest of this CIO.com article to find out about Microsoft's unified communications and online collaboration.