A View from the Application Platform Team

As you may know, I am pursuing a new leadership opportunity within Microsoft. Effective March 3rd I will be transitioning into a new role as Corporate Vice President, OEM Division. This will be a cool opportunity for me to lead the OEM group through its next stages of growth and I am excited to be taking on this leadership role for the company.

Over the past three years, it has been great working with you, our community of partners and customers, helping you deliver innovative solutions. Our intent has been to help you respond more effectively to change while helping to maintain the levels of reliability, security, and interoperability that your business requires. It is great to see the innovation you are bringing to market using our Application Platform products and technologies. Thank you for letting us play a role in your success.

I will continue to be engaged in the Application Platform business through the global Heroes Happen Here launch. The entire team is looking forward to travelling around the globe meeting customers and partners and hearing their stories. The theme for the launch wave is Heroes Happen Here to highlight the great work that developers and IT professionals do every day.

The Crossbar blog will be making the transition with me so keep this on your own blogroll and look for a new Application Platform team blog to launch soon.

Cheers

A key focus area in our platform strategy is business intelligence.  Our goal is to provide all individuals, teams and entire organizations with BI solutions that drive bottom line performance and operational excellence.  This was reiterated by Steve Ballmer last year when he proclaimed “BI for Everyone.”  Microsoft continues to make progress on this strategy which has been validated by industry analysts including Gartner.  They recently released their Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 2008 where we moved into the leaders quadrant.  This reflects our innovations in multiple product areas across the platform. We deliver a complete and integrated solution for customers looking to take advantage of any or all of the three pillars of BI -- data warehousing, reporting and analysis, and performance management. Gartner also recently recognized Microsoft as a Visionary in their Corporate Performance Solutions Magic Quadrant and positioned us as a Leader in the 2007 Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Managements Systems.  This validation is a recognition that we are on the right path to providing the tools and technologies that are in demand by our customers.  To hear more about our BI strategy on an ongoing basis, check out the recently launched BI blog.  Don’t forget to sign up for the RSS feed.   

Today  Windows Server 2008 released to manufacturing and will be available for purchase to new customers on March 1^st .  This is a critical milestone in our platform strategy as it will bring new levels of security and reliability to both enterprise and Web-based solutions.   The combination of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 is a great example of how our platform, by design, is tightly integrated to help IT professionals and development organizations reduce costs, boost efficiency and better align with broader business goals to achieve sustainable strategic advantage. People say this all the time, but the truth is when I talk with customers they often site this as a reality for our offerings.   While no company, or stack, is perfect in this regard, we do spend substantial time on this part of our development efforts and core areas like development, management, security just work…and that makes a HUGE difference to all involved. Of course back to the launch…..With only 23 days to go there is a lot of work being done around the world to make this a fun and exciting event for our customers and partners.  There is still time to register if you haven’t done so already.  As I mentioned last week, we are doing some cool things with this launch including a daily comic strip and a fun video from the Lone Server.  As for our products, we getting rave reviews.  Check out this on from InfoWorld on Visual Studio 2008.

In case you missed it yesterday….. 

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie will join Scott Guthrie on stage as a keynote speaker at MIX08 on Wednesday, March 5, 2008.  Ray will discuss Microsoft’s continued investment across the platform to deliver world class Web technologies and tools.  There’s lots of excitement with Silverlight, IE and much more to share.  But you have to come to MIX08 to get the latest… registration is filling up quickly so customer’s should reserve their seat today.

http://visitmix.com/2008

We are doing some cool things to support our forthcoming Heroes Happen Here launch on 2/27 in LA.  Check out the Daily Comic Series.  A new comic strip will be available Monday – Friday.  Sign up for the RSS feed here.  The content and storylines in many cases will be generated by submissions by IT Pros and Developers and cartooned by artists in the U.S., Japan, India, Europe and Latin America. 

Today, registration opens for Tech·Ed U.S 2008 at www.microsoft.com/teched.  Tech·Ed is Microsoft’s premier technical gathering for IT Professionals and Developers worldwide.  Tech·Ed provides both audiences with top-notch technical education, connection to the community and in-depth product evaluation.  As Microsoft’s largest event, Tech·Ed provides Developers with the resources to build state-of-the-art software solutions and IT Professionals the resources to plan, architect, deploy, manage and secure a connected IT infrastructure.  The focus of TechEd is on today’s technologies however this year we will push the envelope more than ever before in showcasing an increased number of unreleased technologies available in beta. 

 

This is an exciting year for Tech·Ed as it turns 16, and especially for the U.S. audience where the event will expand into Tech·Ed US Developers and Tech·Ed US  IT Professionals.  By splitting Tech·Ed U.S. into two separate events we are able to reach more customers and offer more targeted content and more sessions overall.  In fact, this year there will be a total of 1,600 sessions and labs at Tech·Ed alone which is a Microsoft event record. I am also excited to announce the return of Bill Gates and Bob Muglia who will be the featured keynote speakers at Tech·Ed in Orlando.

 

 I’m always reminded when talking to customers about what makes Tech·Ed the event of the year to attend and consistently I’m told that it is because of the experience. It’s the experience of being able to connect with thousands of colleagues facing the same challenges as you, it’s having in-person access to hundreds of sessions and experts throughout an entire week and it’s the opportunity to dive deep and get your hands on the latest technologies.  Thus the theme of this year’s event is Be a Part of the Experience, and that’s exactly what I invite you to do.  Take advantage of the early bird discount ($1,795) that is available through April 4 and I’ll see you there!

 

Twenty years ago we announced the first version of Microsoft SQL Server. This year we’re working towards launching SQL Server 2008, as part of the biggest enterprise launch in our company’s history. We ship more units of SQL Server than Oracle and IBM combined and we are the fastest growing database and Business Intelligence vendor. We’ve come a long way.

 

To take you back to 1988, here is a snippet of the first press release …

 

January 16, 1988 — Microsoft and Ashton-Tate announce Microsoft SQL Server, a relational database server software product for local area networks (LANs) based on a relational database management system licensed from Sybase.

 

And one of our first ads for SQL Server and LAN Manager, ca. 1989-1992.

Today we have a guest blogger to share some insights - Carol Dullmeyer, Director of Application Platform Communications

 

In my role on the Microsoft Application Platform team, I spend a lot of time speaking with industry analysts and customers. I have a favorite question I like to ask. “What industry challenges are top of mind for you. And, why?” Interestingly, the feedback is very consistent. It reduces down to a simple list:

1. Globalization of business introduces additional complexity and competitive pressures.
2. Compliance and risk management requirements amplify the need for deeper business operations visibility and controls.
3. Pressure to increase the speed and cost-effectiveness of IT innovation.
4. Above all, the need to deliver a highly secure, reliable and interoperable IT platform for more predictable business outcomes.

These challenges may sound familiar to you. They did to me. Although, they are not new to the industry they remain critical for today’s business climate. What did I really learn from these conversations? More than ever, businesses want to become more dynamic or agile so they can transcend these challenges and seize new growth opportunities.

 

In addition to these important industry conversations, the Microsoft team thinks deeply about upcoming trends, how businesses will be impacted and how our future platform innovations could help customers address the next wave of challenges. Our intent is to help customers become more dynamic through IT solutions. We use the term “Dynamic IT” to represent this thinking which greatly shapes innovation within the company. These innovations are then delivered to market through our flagship products and technologies.

 

In fact, we are in the final stages of preparing for the largest Developer and IT Professional launch in the company’s history. We recognize that IT and Development organizations are critical in building and running powerful and agile technology solutions that open the door to new opportunities and let people do their best work. So, why not host a series of global events to celebrate the unsung heroes of business, the Developers and IT Professionals? At these community events, we will officially usher in the 2008 wave of innovation from Microsoft Server and Tools business including Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008. Once our technology is in the hands of the Developers and IT Professionals, watch the real innovation begin.

 

Happy 2008 to everyone. Hope you all had a good holiday.  Last year, we talked a lot about Web technologies and this year will be no different.  The Application Platform team kicked things off with Silverlight taking front and center of Microsoft’s CES presence.  As you may have heard from Bill’s keynote last night and in the press coverage today, Microsoft has teamed with NBC Universal on the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.  Most of us won’t be able to make the games but we, along with NBC, will help bring the games to you, wherever you are.  We will work together on a next-generation online experience and televised coverage of the games will be delivered in cooperation with MSN Network, which will be found at NBCOlynmpics.com on MSN, and use Silverlight technology to stream thousands of hours of exclusive interactive video.  I will be watching, however, I do know it has been 84 years since rugby was included in the Olympics.  It debuted in the 1900 Paris games and then was subsequently canceled just after the games in 1924.  I don’t get too worked up over this as I do enjoy watching the world cup and they are still looking at it for a trial one of these Olympics. :-)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you haven’t yet experienced Silverlight technology, CES is a great time.  Bill’s keynote is streamed using the technology and can be found at www.microsoft.com/ces. Today, the Digital Hollywood @ CES keynote, “Branding beyond the Browser”, will highlight the investments we are making with Silverlight in advertising. Stay tuned to hear more about this when we get to MIX in early March. 

 

Or at least the end of the year, which for me means time with the family and friends.  I hope everyone has a quiet and relaxing holiday and uses technology for fun and relaxation and not solving “real world” problems J   There have been some posts recently around the enterprise computing side of the house not being as “sexy” as the consumer side, but the nice thing is that we get to live in the middle and see the connections.  The bridge between enterprise computing technologies like Astoria, and web or “consumer” technologies like Silverlight are not as far apart as people think, and believe it or not some applications will use both. So in that view we can rest comfortably over the holidays knowing there is more work to do next year and the more connections we make across people, technologies and products the more things we can all collectively get done.

 

So have a great break and we’ll look forward to a completely new world in 2008, that is so radically different that we can throw out all that at old hardware and code and replace it with something new and fresh…maybe with a cool new acronym that the analysts love….or maybe we’ll continue to work on the things that are important to customers and partners and make real progress on hard problems.  You decide J

While it might be hard to believe that Silverlight has only been on the market since September and it is already being used to stream the first ever studio-backed full-length feature film – Jackass 2.5.  For those of you 17 or older, you can see the movie beginning December 19^th – December 31^st, 2007 at Blockbuster. We partnered with Limelight Networks on this project and the combination of their content delivery network and Silverlight brings the movie theater to you anywhere you are.  Designers and developers out there constantly amaze me with all of the cool things they are doing with Silverlight as a development platform including things like Ice Cube’s internet TV.   And, I am constantly amazed that people like Johnny Knoxville think they can play rugby.  Check out my favorite Jackass moment…..

I’m really excited about a couple of great new products to help developers be more productive in their day-to-day lives: the Entity Framework Beta 3 and the ASP.NET Extensions Preview.

 

With today’s Beta 3 release of the ADO.NET Entity Framework, we are providing a platform for developers to use LINQ against any back end database.  Multiple database providers, including IBM, MySQL AB and Sybase, have already pledged support and are developing Entity Framework-enabled offerings.  The commitment from these other vendors shows that we are doing something that they think has merit. The Entity Framework really is a cool technology.  Instead of worrying about programming in T-SQL developers can now define things as entities (like a customer, or a location).  It saves developers a lot of time and hassle and helps keep data consistent. 

 

The ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview, available in the coming days, is a preview of some of the new features that will be available in the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions, which allows developers to build rich, interactive data-centric applications and services for the web.  The Entity Framework is included here as well, along with  ASP.NET MVC, ADO.NET Data Services, ASP.NET Dynamic Data and Increased ASP.NET AJAX functionality.

 

Seems like a strange question, but it’s been a topic of discussion in different forms within Microsoft recently.  It might not be as much fun as trying to make them a unique audience, but it might be a more realistic view of the fact that the web has permeated development to the point where it’s no longer a unique attribute but rather a common element of what is considered core to development today.

 

Many people at Microsoft are looking to find ways to segment the “Web” developers, to make sure they are doing a great job of having the right conversations with these folks.   The thing I always ask is who is or isn’t a web developer.   Is an ISV working on web development a web developer, is a corporate developer working on an intranet project, or internet, a web developer? Is a college student editing their Facebook site a web developer? Is a “Start-up, Web 2.0, SaaS” developer a web developer?   So it might be hard to find “web developers” if we look by organization type. 

 

We could of course look by technology, but then is someone who uses ASP.NET or PHP a web developer, what about Silverlight or Flash, IIS, Ajax, .NET, Ruby, Expression, Sharepoint Web Designer, SQL with spatial data for a web site, etc.   Guess it might be hard to look by technology. 

 

I don’t think size of business or focus of business works either.  My view is if you can’t look by technology, and you can’t look by organization, and you can’t look by business size or type , that it might be hard to find “web developers” as a unique audience, so in the end there are no web developers.  There are just developers, and the web is just one variant on the tools developers use and platform technologies they support.