TechEd 2008

Microsoft Moves Dynamic IT Initiative Forward

| June 12, 2008 | Application Infrastructure | Show Update

| Analyst: Brad Shimmin

Current Perspective: Positive
Vendor Importance: Very High
Market Impact: Moderate

Event Summary

June 10, 2008 -- Speaking to more than 10,000 IT professionals attending the Microsoft TechEd North America 2008 IT Professionals conference, Bob Muglia, Senior Vice President of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, said that the past year has been a pivotal one in the evolution of corporate datacenters. Muglia also said that Microsoft is delivering on its Dynamic IT initiative thanks to products such as Windows Server 2008; Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5; the next version of Identity Lifecycle Manager, code-named ILM “2”; Microsoft Visual Studio 2008; and Microsoft SQL Server 2008.

Analytical Summary

• Current Perspective: Positive on Microsoft’s various announcements and statements of direction made at TechEd 2008, where the company provided detailed information on Dynamic IT. This comprehensive initiative calls for a server software portfolio that is at once service-enabled, cloud-capable, unified and virtualized, process-led, model-driven, and user-focused. Microsoft has a long way to go with this project (five more years by its own admission), but given the firm’s substantial investments in .NET, server, and application virtualization as well as software-as-a-service (SaaS), it stands ready to move quickly toward this goal in step with its customers.

• Vendor Importance: Very high to Microsoft, as the company needed to draw together a singular vision surrounding its recent initiative announcements such as Oslo and standards compliance and openness. By choosing to leverage concepts such as familiarity (using existing user expertise to drive future innovation) and model-driven enterprise software development and management, Microsoft has created a technology-driven rallying cry around IT agility that plays to its database, operating system, and application framework strengths.

• Market Impact: Moderate on the application infrastructure market as a whole, because Microsoft has only set the stage for its Dynamic IT initiative. The company sill lacks a great deal of the requisite infrastructure necessary to achieve its various projects (such as Oslo), relying heavily upon its partner ecosystem for missing software as well as domain expertise within vertical and geographic markets. However, with the looming release of its Hyper-V virtualization technology as a bootstrap into larger and more complex application environments, Microsoft will put pressure on its Java-centric rivals (such as Sun, Oracle/BEA, IBM, Software AG, and SAP) to improve compatibility with and create direct benefits for Microsoft .NET customers.

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