August 3rd, 2009

What's Microsoft's next billion-dollar business? (Hint: it's not search)

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:37 pm

Categories: Azure, Channel, Corporate strategy, Database, Exchange Server, Financial Analyst Meeting, Management tools, Office, SQL Server, Search, Security, SharePoint Server, Support, System Center, System Center, Telecommunications, Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization, Windows Server 2008 R2 /("Windows 7 Server"), Windows server

Tags: Steve Ballmer, Microsoft Corp., System Center, Online Desktop Manager, Microsoft Windows, Collaboration, Content Management, Groupware, Sales Strategy, Enterprise Software

While many company watchers continue to fret over what Microsoft will and won’t do to make money in the search/online advertising space, there are other less sexy Microsoft business units plodding successfully along with relatively little public notice.

Until fairly recently, SharePoint was one of those businesses. But now that Microsoft’s SharePoint sales have passed the $1 billion barrier (they were $1.3 billion for fiscal 2009, which ended for Microsoft on June 30), what’s Microsoft’s next big thing? What products is the company betting on to become the next big, near-term hits?

At Microsoft’s Financial Analyst Meeting (FAM) last week, company officials shared a few tidbits about one of those businesses: Microsoft System Center.  System Center encompasses a variety of system-management tools that Microsoft sells to IT professionals who want to manage their Windows — and Linux/Unix — clients, servers, hypervisors and more.

CEO Steve Ballmer told Wall Street analysts that System Center already has passed the billion-dollar mark. It’s growing at a rate of 30 percent year-over-year, according to Microsoft officials.

System Center is one of a handful of server-side product families that Microsoft is planning to push more in its coming fiscal year. (The others: Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, the forthcoming Forefront Protection Suite, SharePoint 2010, Exchange 2010 and Office Communications Server 2010 — about which Microsoft has said very little to date.)

Microsoft officials mentioned in passing last week that System Center Online Desktop Manager (SCODM) is likely to be a big revenue generator for the company in the near-term. The Online Desktop Manager is one of Microsoft’s own hosted “Online” services that it is touting as a way for cash-strapped customers to save money. Microsoft’s pitch: By having Microsoft manage your users’ desktops and provide the anti-malware, desktop configuration, remote assistance and IT asset-management for them, IT pros won’t have to shell out for on-premise products and people to provide these services.

Microsoft SCODM, which is built on top of Silverlight, is in private testing with select customers now and is expected to be released in final form in 2010.

Beyond 2010 — but before search and online advertising move in any noticeable and serious way from being in the red, to in the black — what else is Ballmer betting on?

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November 5th, 2008

Microsoft offers startups software and cloud services for (almost) free

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:01 am

Categories: Azure, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Live Mesh, Office, System Center, Utility/cloud computing, Web 2.0, Windows client, Windows server

Tags: Software, Microsoft Corp., Web 2.0, Channel Management, Internet, Marketing, Mary Jo Foley, BizSpark, Groupware, Collaboration

Via its new “BizSpark” program announced November 5, Microsoft is offering startups a variety of Microsoft products and technologies for free.

Microsoft unveiled the program on the first day of the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

Dan’l Lewin, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Strategic and Emerging Business Development, emphasized that BizSpark is a global program that is designed to “remove barriers, including general acessability, as well as costs,” for startups setting up infrastructure to run their businesses.

(The “G” word — Google — isn’t mentioned in any of Microsoft’s BizSpark literature or information. But I’d guess another goal of the program is to head off inroads that Google may be making with its hosted apps/services among the cash-strapped startups in its Valley backyard.)

Participants will get access to Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscriptions, Visual Studio tools, Windows, SQL Server, SharePoint Server, Exchange Server, System Center  and more. (The full list of products and services offered to BizSparkers is in the Program Guide.) They’ll also get technical support and marketing/mentoring support, he said.

Microsoft isn’t requiring participating startups to sign up to use the beta versions of its newly announced Azure cloud services, Live Mesh/Mesh Framework and/or its growing family of Microsoft-hosted services (Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Communications Server Online), but it is encouraging participants to consider using these fledgling services. It also plans to offer participants the choice of going with a number of preselected third-party hosting partners if they’d rather use hosted services that aren’t managed by Microsoft.

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November 3rd, 2008

Microsoft Big Brains: Brad Lovering

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:02 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Development tools, Dynamics CRM, Dynamics ERP, Microsoft Big Brains, Oslo, System Center, Utility/cloud computing, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii"), Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas)

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Mary Jo Foley, Team, Oslo, Modeling, Brad Lovering, Team Management, Research & Development, Management, Business Operations

Just before retiring from day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft, Chairman Bill Gates said that he expected Microsoft’s 22 Technical Fellows to get a lot more publicly visible — now that they wouldn’t be living in his shadow. While some of the Microsoft fellows already have been active on the public-speaking circuit, many of them are not widely known outside the company.

I’ve launched this series — “Microsoft Big Brains” — to help remedy that shortcoming. In the coming weeks, I am hoping to profile as many of the company’s tech fellows as to whom I can get access.

Microsoft’s Technical Fellows came to the company via a variety of different routes. Some of them run divisions inside the company; some focus on particularly thorny technical issues that may span a variety of product units. Regardless of where they sit in the organization, the fellows all have been charged with helping Microsoft craft its next-gen products and strategies, much the way that Gates used his regular “Think Weeks” to prioritize what Microsoft needed to do next.

This Week’s ‘Big Brain’: Brad Lovering
Claim to Fame: As of two months ago, runs the entire Oslo team in the Connected System Division, and plans to do so through RTM of Version 1 in 2009.
How Long You’ve Been With Microsoft: 20 years
More About You: Straight out of college at the University of Washington, came to Microsoft and worked on a succession of developer-focused products, ranging from Visual Basic, to Visual J++, to Visual Studio .Net and the .Net Framework, to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). For the past four years, been focused on Oslo tools and strategy
Your Biggest Accomplishment (So Far) at Microsoft: “I’ve been able to ship every product I’ve worked on.”
Team(s) You Also Work With: Azure cloud team, System Center unit, Team Foundation System, Visio, Dynamics CRM/ERP units
Why Stay at Microsoft? “I’ve been at Microsoft half my life. I have my family and I have software. I love making software. I want to do this another 20+ years, if I can.”

Every three to four years during his 20-year career at Microsoft, Technical Fellow Brad Lovering has had a fireside chat with Chairman Bill  Gates, CEO Steve Ballmer and Senior Vice President/Chief Technology Officer David Vaskevitch.

“It’s a balance. I say what I’m interested in. They talk about getting the right teams and assembling the right pieces,” Lovering says.  And then Lovering goes off and works on whatever developer-focused project that he’s interested in and needs him most.

It was four years ago when Lovering initially took on the assignment of working with Microsoft’s then-fledgling Oslo  modeling tools and strategy team.

“The first year was a lot of customer stuff. Then it was a year of getting the team in place. There were various incubations in various places,” he reminisces. “It will be five years total by the time (Version 1) ships” as part of Visual Studio 2010.

It’s somewhat atypical for Lovering to be managing a team of a couple hundred people, as he is doing now.

“I spend most of my time on tech design,”  he says. “Half my job is typically talking to internal (Microsoft) partners. Now (with Oslo), we’re also starting to talk to external partners” he says.

“I’m staying with the Oslo team through RTM and hopefully for another turn for Version 2. I’m excited to do a Version 2 for the first time,” says the typically on-to-the-next-thing Lovering.

What’s left to do after the first set of Oslo deliverables  (a shared repository, the M modeling language and the Quadrant visual-modeling tool) are completed? Lovering says there is a never-ending laundry list, especially around the cloud. Already, the Oslo team has started working with the Azure (Red Dog) cloud OS team to build a domain-specific language (DSL) using Oslo.

“You need a model-driven approach for these big systems,” like Azure, Lovering says

There are potential synergies between Oslo and the System Center systems-management tools and technologies, the Dublin application server team, the Dynamics CRM and ERP wares, too, he says. Almost every big software-development project at Microsoft could benefit from Oslo, Lovering says. Meanwhile, don’t be surprised to see many next-gen Microsoft tools and products include Oslo integration as a feature. Visio, for example, could benefit from tighter import/export integration with Quadrant, Lovering says.

“I spend so much of Microsoft’s money doing crazy stuff,” Lovering concludes. “But they keep saying, ‘go,go, go.’”

So off goes Mr. Oslo to help build out more domains and find ways to get developers on board with Microsoft’s modeling technologies.

For all of the “Microsoft Big Brains” profiles, check out the Big Brains page.

October 23rd, 2008

Amazon battens down the hatches before Microsoft's cloud launch next week

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:50 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, PDC 2008, System Center, Utility/cloud computing, Windows server

Tags: Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft Windows, Cloud Computing, Databases, Enterprise Software, Operating Systems, Software, Data Management

Amazon has made a few tweaks and additions to its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure just days before Microsoft is expected to launch its head-to-head competitive service at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC).

Amazon is playing up the alleged cost-savings users can achieve by going the utility computing route as one of  its major selling points. It’s also playing up its enterprise-readiness.

Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels announced via his blog on October 23 that Amazon has removed the “beta” tag from EC2; introduced a service-level agreement for EC2; and rolled out the promised hosted Windows and SQL Server pieces of its offering. Amazon is supporting both 32- and 64-bit Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with pricing starting at$0.125 per hour, according to the Amazon blog. SQL Server will be available in 64-bit-image form.

Amazon also announced via the Amazon Web Services blog that the company is readying other new cloud-infrastructure components, including an interactive management console; automatic scaling and cloud-monitoring services.

Microsoft is expected to announce its long-rumored cloud computing platform, one component of will likely be known as “Windows Strata,” on Day One of the PDC on October 27. Amazon will be showing off Windows running on EC2 at Microsoft’s conference.

Don’t be surprised to see Microsoft announce beta versions of all of the same cloud services Amazon is offering and promising. If you’re curious what “Windows Server in the cloud,” (Red Dog) System Center in the cloud and SQL Server in the cloud (SQL Server Data Services) will look like, check out Amazon’s offerings to get a good idea.

September 3rd, 2008

New Microsoft virtualization license lets hosters deliver third-party software as a service

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 11:10 am

Categories: Channel, Corporate strategy, Network service providers, Resellers, System Center, Systems integrators, Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization

Tags: Software-as-a-service, Virtualization, Microsoft Corp., App-V, Service Providers License Agreement, Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop, Software As A Service (SaaS), Tools & Techniques, Microsoft Windows, Cloud Computing

The rumors from earlier this spring turned out to be true: Microsoft is licensing its application virtualization technology to hosting providers, setting the stage for hosters to offer third-party software as a service.

The back story: Microsoft offers application-virtualization technology — formerly known as SoftGrid and now called “App-V” — as one of a number of elements of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) to its Software Assurance customers.

(App-V is based on technology Microsoft acquired when it bought Softricity in early 2006. It lets users run applications without actually installing them on a local machine. This allows companies who want to make available a single image of Office or even a custom line-of-business application to multiple users to push it out to them without having to touch each desktop.)

Microsoft announced on September 3 the release- to-manufacturing of the latest version of App-V (version 4.5). Users can’t get their hands on 4.5 yet, however; Microsoft is still a few weeks away from the rest of the MDOP suite going RTM and App-V is not available from Microsoft as a standalone product.

As of October 1, App-V will be available in another form: Indirectly via Microsoft hosting partners. Microsoft has added a new Service Providers License Agreement (SPLA) option, which enables hosters to deliver various third-party software as services, streamed over App-V.

Here are the details, from a new posting on the Official MDOP Blog:

“App-V 4.5 will also feature a new Service Providers License Agreement (SPLA), officially called Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 Hosting for Desktops, which will enable service providers to use App-V 4.5 to deliver third-party ISV developed applications to customers via the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. SaaS powered by App-V is a key enabler to closing the ‘digital divide’ that exists between large enterprises with robust IT capabilities, and small businesses with limited resources. By outsourcing IT functions via service providers, small businesses are able to focus less on maintaining an IT infrastructure and more on growing their core businesses, which in turn allows them to compete more effectively in the marketplace.It’s an important opportunity for businesses to optimize their desktops, even if they lack the resources to build them out in-house.”

When word leaked earlier this year of Microsoft making App-V available in new ways, some speculated that Microsoft would use App-V to deliver Office as a streamed service. Actually, Software Assurance users already can stream Office with App-V.

Interestingly, Microsoft is not allowing hosters to stream any Microsoft software using App-V. So don’t expect hosters to be delivering “Office as a Service,” “Dynamics ERP as a Service,” etc. The new SPLA specifies only third-party software from companies other than Microsoft.

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April 29th, 2008

New test releases out of Microsoft virtualization, mid-size Windows wares

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 11:55 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Management tools, System Center, System Center, Virtualization, Windows Essential Business Server (Centro), Windows Small Business Server (Cougar), Windows server

Tags: Virtualization, Microsoft Corp., Beta, Microsoft Windows, Servers, Operating Systems, Software, Hardware, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft is rolling out new beta builds of various virtualization, management and mid-size server wares.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008: On April 29, Microsoft delivered a public beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (creatively code-named “Virtual Machine Manager vNext”). The new SCVMM release will allow admins to centrally manage their physical and virtual assets from a single application. Virtual assets which will be manageable by the new release include Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V (which is still in beta); Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 and/or VMware ESX Server, according to Microsoft.

System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions: Also on April 29, Microsoft unveiled a public beta of System Center Operation Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions. Microsoft is providing “out-of-the-box support) for some platforms (like HP-UX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell’s SuSE Enterprise Linux and Sun Solaris) and is relying on third-party providers to do management packs for other platforms (like Apache’s wares, MySQL and Oracle).

System Center Operations Manager 2007 Connectors: A beta of the updated System Center Ops Manager 2007 Connectors went out on April 29. These connectors are for exchanging System Center monitoring data with third-party management wares, like HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console, Microsoft officials said.

All three of these betas are available via Microsoft’s Connect test site, according to the company.

Meanwhile, on the Windows Server front, Microsoft hit last week the Release Candidate (RC) 0 milestone of its Windows Essential Business Server (”Centro” mid-market server) product, according to testers, who requested anonymity.

Microsoft officials said earlier this year to expect Centro and “Cougar” (its small-business complement) to go to public beta some time in the first half of this year and both launch together in the second half of 2008.

The private test version of Essential Business Server includes a management server, security server, messaging server and schema-upgrade tool. It is available to pre-selected testers only on the Microsoft Connect test site.

October 1st, 2007

Microsoft System Center gets the services treatment

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 11:39 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, System Center, Web 2.0

Tags: Software, Microsoft Corp., Service, System Center, Tools & Techniques, Management, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft officials weren’t kidding when they said they were working on a services complement to just about every one of the company’s software products. The latest to get a Software+Services (S+S) makeover: System Center.

System Center is Microsoft’s uber-brand for its systems-management software and encompasses everything from Redmond’s virtual-machine-manager technology, to its Operations Manager product.

Microsoft officials launched on September 28 a new System Center Online blog, with a tag line proclaiming, “Delivering world-class management software via services.” In the first post on the new site, the “AIS Team” blogged about Microsoft’s testing of its new asset-inventory service (AIS), which is based on technology Microsoft acquired when it purchased AssetMetrix.

“Asset Inventory Service is a hosted service that allows you to download a small client and install it on your PCs, upon which the client will register and report the software inventory of that PC to a web-based service. The service compares the list with the AIS central software title catalog, rationalizes the publisher, names and version numbers, and categorizes the software in your report. You (and your designee’s) can then securely access the reports through a simple-to-use webpage after providing proper credentials. You can use these reports to simply count your installations, prepare for your next round of procurement, or check the successful deployment of applications,” according to the post. “In the future, you will also be able to compare this information to your Microsoft software licenses and automatically build your license reconciliation reports.”

The service is available to selected testers in beta form.  A Community Technology Preview (CTP) test build is available only to Software Assurance customers who have purchased the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP).  The final release of the service will be later this year, according to the AIS team.

I can see why Microsoft would like to keep tabs on which customers aren’t “trued-up” with their licenses, but I’m not so sure that many customers will be willing for Microsoft to store information about not just Microsoft licenses, but third-party ones, as well — even if Microsoft attests that the license counts are secure.

July 31st, 2007

SoftGrid app-virtualization: Another way to offer software as a service

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:56 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Google, Office, Office 2007, System Center, Virtualization

Tags: Desktop, Software-as-a-service, Google Docs, Softricity SoftGrid, Microsoft Corp., Mary Jo Foley

MDOP, the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, is the fastest-selling-ever Volume Licensing product from Microsoft, according to the company. Since Microsoft introduced MDOP six months ago, customers have bought 2 million licenses for MDOP.

MDOP consists of a number of different tools and technologies, all of which are developed being enhanced and maintained by Microsoft’s System Center team: SoftGrid application virtualization, diagnostics and recovery toolset, advanced group-policy management, an inventory-asset service and desktop error-monitoring capabilities. (As reader Ryan McCarthy with SoftChoice Corp. correctly noted, Microsoft acquired, not built, these technologies: SoftGrid from Softricity; Asset Inventory from AssetMetrix; Advanced Group Policy from Desktop Standard; and Diagnostic Toolset from Winternals.)

If I were to guess which of these might be most enticing to customers, I’d say SoftGrid might be the biggest carrot. And if it’s not yet the crown jewel of MDOP, I’d predict it will be by the time Microsoft issues its next MDOP refresh.

(Keep in mind that the only way customers currently can get MDOP and SoftGrid is to sign up for Software Assurance, Microsoft’s annuity-maintenance licensing program. Based on early information on Microsoft’s plans for Windows 7, it sounds like the Redmondians plan to continue to offer existing and forthcoming MDOP services as carrots/sticks to get more folks to sign up for Software Assurance.)

SoftGrid — technology Microsoft acquired when it bought Softricity in early 2006 — lets users run applications without actually installing them on a local machine. This allows companies who want to make available a single image of Office or even a custom line-of-business application to multiple users to push it out to them without having to touch each desktop. It also will aid companies in deploying application patches, as only the changed/updated bits will be streamed to users’ desktops (rather than all of the bits, including those which haven’t changed), she said.

“SoftGrid just pull (the bits) that are needed,” said Gavriella Schuster, Senior Director of Product Management of the Desktop Optimization Pack team.”IT doesn’t have to do all the regression testing it normally does. It doesn’t need to check in advance for potential application conflicts and crashes. It’s especially good for users with lots of custom business applications.”

SoftGrid also allows users to work offline, since the bits that are installed on a user’s desktop remain there, Schuster noted, even when the machine is disconnected from the corporate network.

SoftGrid application virtualization “version 1″ (which is part of the current MDOP) allows users to stream applications to any desktop inside their firewall, Schuster explained. But the next version will allow users to stream any application that can be virtualized to their desktops or the Web, she said.

(Applications that cannot be virtualized are anything with a boot-time install, like virus-scan software, Schuster said.)

Is this the way Microsoft will offer medium- to large-size businesses Office as a “service”? Instead of fielding a Web-based version of Office, why not just convince users to stream it using SoftGrid?

Schuster wasn’t willing or able to talk about Microsoft’s competitive positioning plans.

“MDOP turns a desktop into a set of dynamically delivered services,” is as far as Schuster would go.

Where do you think Microsoft is going with SoftGrid? Is streaming Office via SoftGrid Microsoft’s answer for enterprise customers considering Google Docs & Spreadsheets? (With a hosted or at least ad-funded version of Microsoft Works being Microsoft’s competitor to Google Docs & Spreadsheets for individuals and small businesses?)

June 29th, 2007

Microsoft goes internal for new Business Solutions chief

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 5:10 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Dynamics CRM, Dynamics ERP, System Center

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Microsoft, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft is moving Kirill Tatarinov, currently the head of its Management and Solutions unit, to lead the Microsoft Business Solutions business.

The MBS team, which oversees the Microsoft Dynamics ERP/CRM family of products, had been searching for a new chief since March, when Microsoft moved Satya Nadella from MBS to head up the newly combined Live Search/adCenter business.

Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) is part of Microsoft’s larger Microsoft Business Division, which encompass Microsoft Office, SharePoint Server and Microsoft’s unified-communications products.

Tatarinov is a five year Microsoft veteran. Before Microsoft, Tatarinov was Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for BMC software.

No word yet on who will replace Tatarinov on Microsoft’s systems-management side of the business; a search is underway.

March 22nd, 2007

Surprise: Microsoft's DSI is not dead

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 1:00 pm

Categories: Corporate strategy, Development tools, System Center

Tags:

In my roundup from December 2006 of Microsoft people, products and strategies that had disappeared, I mentioned Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) as No. 8. I noted:

"Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI). DSI isn't dead. But it's not exactly alive and kicking, either. After 2005, a year when Microsoft officials seemed to lump nearly every management-related product and service under Microsoft's DSI autonomic-computing moniker, DSI got barely a mention in 2006. The Microsoft DSI Web site contains a lot of old links. Will DSI get a facelift in 2007, or just fade quietly away?"

The answer to my not-so-rhetorical question arrived today. Microsoft is going to try to resuscitate DSI in the coming weeks/months, starting with the March 22 announcement that Microsoft and a handful of systems-management partners — and competitors — are submitting the XML-based Service Modeling Language (SML) to the W3C for standardization.

First things first: What the heck is DSI?

Because it seems loath to use common industry terms like "autonomic computing" or "utility computing," Microsoft has a hard time providing a succinct definition of DSI. This is Microsoft's current definition of DSI from its Web site:

"The Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) is Microsoft's technology strategy for products and solutions that help businesses enhance the dynamic capability of its people, process, and IT infrastructure using technology."

Yeah, kind of like the fairly meaningless "People Ready Business." Luckily, I got a better defintion today out of Ed Anderson, Microsoft's director of DSI.

"DSI is an environment where your systems are self-aware and can adapt, business- or technology-wise to a changing environment," Andersen said. DSI is a ten-year initiative, Andersen reminded me, and Microsoft is currently in Year No. 4.

"DSI has gone through a series of evolutions," Andersen acknowledged. It started out as a plan for managing servers in a distributed environment. These days, DSI also addresses managing applications, virtualization and other "agile computing" (my note: UGH!) topics, Andersen said.

The March 22 announcement regarding the submission of SML to the W3C fits in here in the following way: SML is the successor to SDM, Microsoft's System Definition Model (SDM).

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