Guest Blogger: Carol Dullmeyer, Director of Application Platform Communications

Steven Guggenheimer — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 23:51:00 GMT

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:

Globalization of business introduces additional complexity and competitive pressures.

Compliance and risk management requirements amplify the need for deeper business operations visibility and controls.

Pressure to increase the speed and cost-effectiveness of IT innovation.

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.

Customer Visits and Conversations

Steven Guggenheimer — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 04:48:00 GMT

The last few weeks have been pretty busy with customer visits and talks. The breadth of the conversation is extremely vast and heads along a few paths. One path is a conversation on technology trends and areas of investment for the industry and the company. These range from virtualization, to services (software services as opposed to consulting services), to business processes and modeling to user experience and more. The other path being along more traditional platform conversations and the mapping of technology to business challenges. In both instances the connection between the core infrastructure and the application platform is of keen interest, and how the bridges between the Business and IT, IT and Development, and the Development and the Data Center are made stronger is another key conversation. While we have more options and tools to enable agility and flexibility these come at the cost of more complexity. So we have to develop solutions that look across the entire application lifecycle and how we connect business, development and IT together in order to make significant gains based on new technologies, versus creating a further quagmire to wade through.

From the Microsoft standpoint we are making significant investments in each of these areas and working to insure that individual products and technologies are built with the total solution in mind so we can build, run and manage applications (and our environments) in a more agile and cost effective way over time. There is a lot of depth in any one of these conversations so maybe I’ll start tackling them as we go forward

Big game for the Seahawks this weekend and some good rugby going on with the Rugby World Cup 2007. If you want a fun site for rugby content check out www.rucku.com Next week I’ve got some more customer and partner visits in the US and Europe so looking forward to further discussions to see what’s people are thinking about as we come out of summer and into fall. I want to thanks the folks on my team for the nice comments J

A View from the Application Platform Team : Application Platform

Guest Blogger: Carol Dullmeyer, Director of Application Platform Communications

Customer Visits and Conversations