December 29th, 2009

Microsoft Big Brains: Butler Lampson

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:31 am

Categories: Azure, Corporate strategy, Database, Healthcare, Live Mesh, Management tools, Multicore/distributed computing, Research, Robotics, SQL Server, Security, SharePoint Server, Utility/cloud computing, Windows client

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Butler Lampson, Synchronization, Productivity, Robots, Tablets, Thin Clients, Emerging Technologies, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets

Just before retiring from day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft in 2008, 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.

Last year I 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. Slowly but surely, I’m making my way through the list.

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’: Butler Lampson
Claim to Fame: Helped design the Alto distributed PC system at Xerox PARC
How Long You’ve Been With Microsoft: 19 years
More About You: These days, working at Microsoft Research on a variety of projects, including security, privacy, fault tolerance, user interface design, systems and network design and more. He also currently is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before joining Microsoft, Lampson was on the faculty at Berkeley, the Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox PARC and Digital Equipment Corp.’s Systems Research Center. He has won a variety of awards, including the IEEE von Neumann Medal, the Turing Award and the Draper Prize.
Your Biggest Accomplishment (So Far) at Microsoft: Helped designed Microsoft’s Tablet PC software and the company’s Palladium (Next Generation Secure Computing Base) security system
Team(s) You Also Work With: Office, Windows Live, SQL Server, System Center
Why stay at Microsoft? “Microsoft is an interesting place. You have a lot of opportunity for huge impact.”

If there were a jack of all trades at Microsoft, Technical Fellow Butler Lampson would be at the top of the list of those deserving that title.

Lampson has only worked in one product group (Tablet PC) during his tenure at Microsoft. But as an “individual contributor,” he has influenced many others across the company, ranging from the healthcare group, to the anti-piracy team.

These days, Lampson is spending the majority of his time working on the problem of data synchronization. He is focused on not just the back-end sync-integration challenges, but also on how to provide visual cues to users so they will know how “stale” the data is with which they are working.

Synchronization is at the crux of how Microsoft delivers on its three-screens-and-a-cloud strategy, and, as such, is a priority for everyone at Microsoft, from Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie on down. Microsoft offers a host of synchronization-related products at at present, including Live Mesh, SkyDrive, Sync Framework, SQL Azure Sync Provider and SQL Server Replication.

(Lampson himself is using the Sync Framework as the starting point for most of his sync work. And it’s the Sync Framework that Microsoft recently demonstrated as helping Silverlight apps to work offline. So maybe Sync Framework is leading the race among MIcrosoft’s myriad sync technologies that will comprise the company’s ultimate sync platform….)

“We need to be able to override the name space,” Lampson said. “We do a so-so job at Microsoft with the four or five different products that we have…. But there is no one synchronization platform. And we can’t figure out (how to create one) until we deploy” what we have.”

Lampson isn’t a believer in the “thin client story,” he said; a world where there is next-to-no local processing happening on the client only is practical only in mainframe-centric organizations with 3270 terminals. Different kinds of clients need to be able to sync with different data sources, sometimes in an always-connected fashion and sometimes in occasionally connected ones. Administration and management advances are going to be key to how synchronization happens, he said.

There’s a trade-off that needs to be made between consistency (currency) of data and availability of it, Lampson said. In some applications, consistency can be replaced acceptably with “eventual consistency” (as in the case of e-mail and DNS).

Synchronization isn’t the only realm where Lampson is spending most of his cycles. He is also interested in the more philosophical problems around the interaction between computers and the physical world.

Computers, in the early part of their lifecycle, were used to simulate and model the physical world. In the 80s, computers were used as the hub of communications. The next big wave of computing will involve “embodiment,” Lampson said, citing as examples the Roomba, self-driving cars and robot receptionists. In the embodiment wave, robotics, sensecams and GPS technologies will be essential elements of the next wave of computing devices, Lampson noted.

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

December 10th, 2009

Microsoft adds another company to its healthcare portfolio

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 7:24 am

Categories: Azure, Corporate strategy, Google, Healthcare, Utility/cloud computing

Tags: Health Care, Microsoft Corp., HealthVault, Vertical Industries, Healthcare, Benefits, Human Resources, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft is continuing to add to its family of healthcare sofware and services with yet another purchase: Sentillion Inc.

On December 10, Microsoft announced its intentions to purchase for an undisclosed amount the privately held Andover, Mass.-based maker of identity- and access-management software for the healthcare industry.

Microsoft officials said they plan to integrate Sentillion’s products with MIcrosoft’s Amalga Unified Intelligence System (UIS). (Amalga is based on the Azyxxi assets Microsoft bought back in 2006.)

Healthcare is the only vertical software and services market where Microsoft (so far) is investing in a major way.

Microsoft has a software/service platform known as HealthVault, which offers consumers and their medical practitioners access to electronic healthcare records. The service component of HealthVault is one of a handful of Microsoft services that already is hosted on top of Azure. Amalga UIS is one of the main elements of Microsoft’s enterprise health-information-system platform. Microsoft integrated HealthVault with Amalga earlier this year.

Sentillion will continue to sell and support customers of its products, while Microsoft “invests in the long-term evolution” of the integrated wares, according to the press release. Microsoft’s purchase is expected to be finalized in calendar 2010, the release says.

Here are a few more details about Microsoft’s plans for Sentillion from today’s release:

“By combining Sentillion’s context management and single sign-on technologies with Amalga UIS, a real-time data aggregation solution, Microsoft aims to give clinicians new insight about patients in real time and enable them to perform the appropriate task with unprecedented speed. At the same time, the workflow of clinicians will be simplified, allowing them to spend less time navigating different IT systems and more time with patients.”

I’m wondering how Microsoft’s own identity- and access-management wares (the recently announced Windows Identity Foundation and other remaining “Geneva” components) play in here.  No mention so far.

Update: From a December 10 post to the Forefront Team Blog:

“This ties to our efforts in identity & access management - part of the Business Ready Security strategy - to deliver capabilities in the Active Directory platform, and through next-generation products, such as the Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010.

“The (Sentillion) acquisition brings complementary assets to Microsoft in the areas of single sign-on (SSO), user provisioning and context management that are focused on the healthcare industry. As we integrate Sentillion into Microsoft in the coming months, we will further explore synergies with Microsoft’s identity and access management solutions, such as our Forefront products.”

October 1st, 2009

Microsoft adds consumer-friendly face to its HealthVault platform

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:04 am

Categories: Azure, Corporate strategy, Healthcare, MSN, Search, Silverlight (wpf/e), Utility/cloud computing

Tags: Microsoft HealthVault, Health Care, Microsoft Corp., Vertical Industries, Benefits, Healthcare, Human Resources, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft launched on October 1 a beta of a new MSN service aimed at helping consumers manage their own health information.

The new service, known as My Health Info, is based on Microsoft’s HealthVault. HealthVault is a software and services platform that is hosted on Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud-computing environment. The service makes use of Silverlight and allows users to search for health-related topics via Bing.

My Health Info is designed to allow consumers to store all kinds of personal health information, like childrens’ vaccination schedules, prescription records, blood sugar levels, etc. It also will allow consumers to monitor “topical areas of interest,” like swine flu. The service can be configured to maintain separate records on multiple people, so that a user could manage information on multiple family members.

At the end of August in 2009, Microsoft removed the two-year-old beta tag from HealthVault. There’s no word on when Microsoft expects to do the same with the new MSN health service.

My Health Info makes use of the same security and privacy mechanisms that HealthVault itself does. All health data is encrypted; every time data is changed or read, a log is generated; and HTTPS is the protocol via which information is passed, according to Microsoft officials.

Microsoft created the new service to serve the 83 percent of people who search for health-related information on the Web, officials said. Serving ads on health content is also a huge opportunity for the company.

September 2nd, 2009

Microsoft HealthVault service sheds its beta tag

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:00 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Corporate strategy, Healthcare, Utility/cloud computing, Windows Live

Tags: Microsoft HealthVault, Microsoft Corp., Beta, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft quietly removed the “beta” tag from its HealthVault heatlh records-management service on August 26.

(I discovered this update via a Tweet from OakLeaf Systems’ blogger Roger Jennings and confirmed the fact with Microsoft yesterday.)

Microsoft launched the beta of HealthVault — one of its early examples of Software+Services — in October 2007. HealthVault is a client application plus a Live service that will allow consumers to build and maintain a personal health record. One of the inputs into this health record are results from Microsoft’s health search-engine, also known as HealthVault, which is based on the MedStory search technology Microsoft bought in 2006 2007.

Update (September 15): A Microsoft spokesperson e-mailed a couple of new pieces of information re: HealthVault. First, “We no longer connect Search to HealthVault, but MedStory’s search technology now powers the health search results in Bing.”  Secondly, Microsoft is no longer referring to HealthVault as a “Live” or Windows Live service, as that “could lead to confusion.”  Instead, Microsoft prefers to describe HealthVault as “a client application (for device connectivity) and a cloud platform,” or as a “personal health application platform,” the spokesperson said.

HealthVault stores patient information in a Microsoft-hosted database and is one of the first Microsoft offerings to make use of the Azure cloud operating environment. In April of this year, Microsoft announced it had integrated HealthVault with Amalga, its patient-information software.

I asked Microsoft what changes it had made to HealthVault between the beta and final releases of the service. Microsoft officials sent via e-mail the following response from David Cerino, General Manager of Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group:

“In order to make the migration out of Beta, Microsoft products need to meet a series of internal compliance requirements across the areas of Accessibility, Interoperability, Security, Privacy, Software Integrity, Geopolitical and Intellectual Property. HealthVault made a number of updates, most notably in the area of Accessibility, where the team has placed a tremendous amount of focus over the last two releases, enabling new scenarios in low vision, vision impaired, color blindness, mobility and hearing.”

Even though HealthVault is no longer in beta, Cerino noted that Microsoft plans to continue to add more features to the software and service through regularly released new updates.

On the HealthVault blog, Microsoft published the release notes for the final version of HealthVault. The software/service is ready for deployment in production and pre-production environments, according to the post. A .Net software-development kit for the final release will be available “shortly,” according to the company.

June 24th, 2009

Five reasons why Microsoft's Hohm is more than just another Web 2.0 service

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 5:59 am

Categories: Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Dynamics ERP, Healthcare, Live Mesh, Research, Search, Security, Utility/cloud computing, Windows CE

Tags: Web, Web 2.0, Health Care, Microsoft Corp., Energy, Hohm, HealthVault, Vertical Industries, Benefits, Healthcare

Microsoft’s Startup Business Accelerator (the folks who brought you the Microsoft Vine public-information service) are introducing another new service on June 24. That offering, known officially as Hohm and which which handles home-energy management, looks like yet another generic Web 2.0-type service.

But Hohm is more than an attempt by Microsoft to establish its cred in the “save the planet” movement. Recently, I had a chance to ask Troy Batterberry, the Hohm product manager, about the service. After talking to him, here are five reasons I think Hohm is more than initially meets the green eye:

1. Hohm is a hosted serice running on Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform. There are relatively few Microsoft services that already are running fully on top of Azure. HealthVault is one; Live Mesh is another. The calculations upon which the Hohm service is built are “really complicated,” Batterberry said, and require historical modeling. By running on Azure, Hohm can be scaled up or down, depending on demand, to use lots of compute cycles during peak demand.

2. Speakng of HealthVault, Hohm was patterned after it and uses the same security and privacy mechanisms that Microsoft’s health-information service uses. While energy consumption data doesn’t seem as in need of guarding that patient health data is, energy usage and pricing are information that is sensitive and to which access needs to be controlled, said Batterberry.

3. Hohm is one of Microsoft’s first — but not only — product tailored to the energy market. (The Dynamics team already launched an energy-management dashboard product last year, making it Microsoft’s first energy-specific “product.”) Remember how Microsoft began hiring doctors and healthcare experts — and even bought a healthcare-specific company — in order to build and field HealthVault and Azyxxi? The company is planning a similarly serious foray into the energy field, building out additional energy-centric software products and services, Batterberry said.

4. Is Microsoft working on an energy-centric search capability/engine, the same way that Microsoft has incorporated health-specific search data into Bing? “It could make sense to go into the decision-specific energy area,” Batterberry said.

5. Microsoft considers Hohm part of a “10-year (investment) journey” into the energy market. Microsoft’s energy-specific focus will encompass consumers, utility companies, device makers and more, Batterberry said. Microsoft may end up fielding some kind of enerprise-focused energy-management product/service, he said. The company may become a player in the energy-centric device-control space (not a big stretch, given Microsoft’s work in embedded operating systems with Windows Embedded Compact).

Users (in the U.S. only for now) interested in test-driving Hohm — which was codenamed “Niagara,” as the energy pioneer Nikola Tesla did a lot of his research in Niagara Falls — will be able to sign up for the beta this week on the Hohm page. Microsoft is expecting the final version of the service to be released in about six to nine months, Batterberry said.

May 20th, 2009

'Partner' bots: The next killer robotics app? (And will Microsoft bite?)

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:18 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Development tools, Healthcare, Multicore/distributed computing, Research, Robotics

Tags: Robotics, Microsoft Corp., Bot, Trower, Robots, Emerging Technologies, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft has been participating in the robotics market for the past couple of years with various robotics toolkits and related technologies. The public face of robotics for Microsoft has been Tandy Trower, who, until last fall, was the General Manager of the Microsoft Robotics Group.

Trower has moved into more of an “ambassadorial”/strategic planning role, as of late. But that hasn’t stopped him from thinking about what could become the “killer app” in the robotics space: “Partner” bots, robots aimed at the assistive-healthcare market.

Trower and I exchanged e-mail recently. Here are excerpts from his e-mail to me (used here with his permission):

“I thought I’d send you an update on my status. I am still at Microsoft, but note though there was a change that occurred last fall, coincident with the latest release of our robotics toolkit. I turned over day-to-day operations of the robotics team to my product unit manager and I have shifted to a more “ambassadorial” and strategic role looking beyond just the development needs of the emerging new robotics industry and studying the potential markets for robots. I am happy to share some preliminary observations with you….

“Education continues to be an important market for robots. Competitions like Kamen’s FIRST, Botball, and others are continuing to expand. That’s good because apparently the US ranks 6th overall in the world with regards to engineering degrees. Even President Obama mentioned educational robot competitions when he introduced his new science and technology advisory committee. But education products can be a tough business, especially when schools can barely afford regular curriculum materials, let alone a $250 LEGO Mindstorms kit.

“However, the market that intrigues me the most is the assistive care. Just the unprecedented growth of the senior population is enough to draw my attention. With about 40M seniors now (600M WW), that’s expected in the US to rise to 71M by 2030 and 86M (2B WW) by 2050. And that’s just in the US. In Japan, the percentage of the population 65+ is already over 20% and that will be the case throughout two-thirds of the rest of the developed world by 2050. Baby boomers will be the main contributing factor as they start to enter the senior category in 2011. Further, the oldest old are the fast growing segment. By 2050, it is estimated that there will be 9M seniors in the US that are over the age of 85.

“All of this is going to put one heck of a burden on our existing healthcare system where we are already facing a gap in professional healthcare workers that is expected to grow even wider. And because boomers had smaller families, even non-professional caregiver support is shrinking. This could be a great opportunity for applying digital technology. I am certain you saw that Intel and GE already announced they are going after it. Also Google and Microsoft have made statements about healthcare, though not focused solely on the senior population.

“To me this presents a great opportunity and possibly the ‘killer app’ for personal robots.

Read the rest of this entry »

April 21st, 2009

All-women's team makes Microsoft Imagine Cup contest finals

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 10:49 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Development tools, Healthcare, Research

Tags: Team, Mobile, Microsoft Corp., Mobile Device, All-women, CAMRA, Team Management, Advertising & Promotion, Management, Marketing

For the first time in the seven years Microsoft has sponsored the Imagine Cup student-developer contest, an all-women’s team has made it into the U.S. final rounds.

(Update: Actually, this is the first time an all-women’s team has made it into the U.S. finals for the Imagine Cup. As one reader correctly noted, the United Arab Emirates fielded a winning all-women’s team in 2007. Microsoft officials said that there also is an all-women team finalist in Cairo this year. Sorry for the confusion)

This year’s contest theme is solving the world issues and problems outlined in the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals. The three-woman team from Indiana’s DePauw University (known as the “MangoBunnies”) is developing a mobile medical application. Ashley Myers, Erin “Ed” Donahue and Malisa Vongskul are working on an app known as Computer-Assisted Medication Regimen Adherence (CAMRA). According to the description of their project:

CAMRA “discreetly and conveniently supports HIV and AIDS patients by providing a medication regimen directly to their personal mobile device. CAMRA uses an XML Web service to send profile data from the Web site to a patient’s personal mobile device and retrieves information about user history. This application leverages the portability and convenience of mobile devices to turn them into stand-alone healthcare products.”

Ever since blogger Long Zheng and his Team SOAK won last year’s Imagine Cup world finals, I’ve been keeping a closer eye on the Microsoft-sponsored competition. This year’s semi-finals are in Cambridge, Mass., in May; the finals are slated for this summer in Egypt.

Meanwhile, speaking of Microsoft contests, there’s a renewed effort inside Microsoft to get more user-generated “I’m a PC” video content. The “Windows Brand Ambassador” contest (details of which are posted on the ithinkdiff.com site) is accepting entries through June 1. So if you still haven’t done your home-made video as to why you are still a Windows user, in spite of all your cool Silicon Valley friends’ RDF-inspired ridicule, now’s your chance….

April 8th, 2009

Kiev and Kumo: The long and winding road to Live Search's rebrand

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 7:56 am

Categories: Code names, Corporate strategy, Google, Healthcare, Search

Tags: Codename, Microsoft Live Search, Microsoft Corp., Branding, Search, Product Marketing, Marketing, Mary Jo Foley

As Microsoft inches closer to the expected June rebranding and launch of the latest iteration of its search engine, company officials are sharing selective bits and pieces of what the Redmondians are planning.

In an April 8 Wall Street Journal story about Microsoft’s search-branding challenges , Yusuf Mehdi, the Senior Vice President of Microsoft’s Online Audience Business Group, mentioned “Kiev.” Kiev, a codename I first heard about via LiveSide, seems to be the uber-brand for Microsoft’s upcoming search release. Kumo, the codename for the search-engine component, is one piece of Kiev, Mehdi confirmed with the Journal.

(Other Kiev components, I’ve heard, include the vertical search areas where Microsoft has been focusing its attentions — product search, celebrity search, travel and healthcare. I’m not sure what the codenames are for the next releases of each of those elements….or if each vertical has a separate codename.)

From what I’m hearing from various quarters, “Kumo” is looking less and less likely to be the final new name for Live Search. Users, current and potential, just don’t seem that keen on it. Bing is now sounding like the leading candidate. (But Bing also could end up as the new brand for Microsoft local search/mapping, based on how Microsoft recently applied for the Bing trademark.)

Unless Microsoft has yet another search name hidden away, I’m now betting Bing is not just a “Plan B” but is likely to be Microsoft’s new search brand.

April 6th, 2009

Microsoft links HealthVault service with Amalga software

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:50 am

Categories: Azure, Corporate strategy, Healthcare, Red Dog, Surface, Utility/cloud computing

Tags: Health Care, Microsoft Corp., HealthVault, Vertical Industries, Benefits, Healthcare, Enterprise Software, Software, Human Resources, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft has integrated its HealthVault service and its Amalga patient-information software, the company announced on April 6.

The integration is one of the new features of the newly-unveiled 2009 update to the Amalga Unified Intelligence System (UIS) platform. Other new features of UIS 2009 include preconfigured add-on modules, Amalga Web functionality and IT tools aimed at lowering total cost of ownership, according to Microsoft.

HealthVault is Microsoft’s consumer-focused health-records-management Software+Service platform, which the company unveiled officially in 2007. (The service component of HealthVault is one of a handful of Microsoft services that already is hosted on top of Azure.) Amalga UIS, (one of the products formerly under the Azyxxi brand), is one of the main elements of Microsoft’s enterprise health-information-system platform.

A year ago, Microsoft was testing the feasibility and usefulness of integrating HealthVault with Amalga.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer hasn’t been talking up Microsoft’s investments in healthcare much this year. When itemizing Microsoft’s short- and long-term bets for the Wall Street crowd, Ballmer previously called out healthcare as one of the nascent areas which had the potential to become one of the company’s hot growth areas.

Speaking of healthcare, Microsoft is showing off prototypes of healthcare applications that could work on Microsoft Surface tabletops at this week’s Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2009 conference. Among the demo apps: a patient-scheduling system and a patient check-in app.

(I still think the idea of using a Surface as a stovetop makes more short-term sense. — April Fool’s or not.)

April 9th, 2008

Microsoft delivers first commercial version of healthcare-info system

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:53 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Healthcare, Web 2.0, Windows Live

Tags: Patient, Health Care, Microsoft Corp., Amalga, Vertical Industries, Benefits, Healthcare, Enterprise Software, Software, Human Resources

Amalga, the product formerly known as Azyxxi (wow, try saying that ten times fast), is finally out as a commercial product.

On April 9, Microsoft announced that its healthcare-information-system product — which has been used for more than 10 years by MedStar Health System, the organization from which Microsoft bought Azyxxi a couple years ago — is now available broadly to other customers.

Customers for this product, a company spokesman reiterated, are “large health organizations - any variety of hospital, health system  - with existing health information systems.” Amalga is meant to integrate with existing health-record software and systems and to help the disparate patient information sources integrate with one another.

For now, there is no direct connection between Amalga and HealthVault, Microsoft’s patient-information software/service combo, a beta of which Microsoft fielded last October. That said, it sounds like something is in the works. From the aformentioned Microsoft spokesman:

“There is an Amalga-HealthVault patient portal pilot underway where information from Amalga can be pulled into a patient’s HealthVault record. Microsoft recognizes that healthcare is a complex problem that will require solutions both within complex internal hospital systems (Amalga) and within the complex external healthcare ecosystem (HealthVault) and the need to integrate the two. Stay tuned for future developments on that front.”

Healthcare is one of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s top investment areas, in terms of his three-plus year plan for diversifying Microsoft’s revenue base.