Microsoft Ships Web-Focused Exchange Server 2010

| Nov 10, 2009 | Collaboration and Conferencing | Competitive Update

| Analyst: Brad Shimmin

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

Event Summary

November 9, 2009 — At the Microsoft Tech Ed Europe 2009 conference in Germany, Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop announced that Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 is now available worldwide. Along with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, Exchange Server 2010 is part of a generation of solutions designed for increased business productivity and cost savings.

Analytical Summary

• Current Perspective: Positive on Microsoft's announcement of the public release of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. Available immediately on a global basis, this offering includes a number of administrative and user enhancements, which, though incremental in nature, hit a number of industry hot buttons such as discovery and compliance, cloud-based deployment, user autonomy, unified messaging and cross-browser parity. Considered as a whole, these enhancements will further solidify Microsoft Exchange as the de facto standard for corporate messaging and thereby strengthening Microsoft's hold on the corporate desktop.

• Vendor Importance: Very high to Microsoft as the company needed to demonstrate its ability to keep pace with and fend of attacks from hosted messaging vendors (most notably Google, IBM and now Cisco) by placing an emphasis on developing software geared toward software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployments. Evidence of this includes the company's move to create parity between Web and native e-mail client applications, its continuing efforts to offer Exchange as a service from its Microsoft Online Services platform, and its work to put more control and responsibility into the hands of users.

• Market Impact: High on the collaboration and conferencing market, because this announcement helps Microsoft further build a highly integrated collaboration suite that features a consistent client interface across disparate platforms and spans on-premises and in-cloud environments. This approach will put substantial pressure on rival IBM to ramp up its SaaS program for messaging not just with LotusLive iNotes, but with Lotus Notes itself.

CLIENTS ONLY

Competitive Positives and Concerns

Recommended Vendor Actions

| Client access - Full report in Collaboration and Conferencing | More information

Recommended Competitor Actions

• All rivals should position the release of Exchange Server 2010 as though it were a major service patch for Exchange Server 2007. The updates available with this release lend themselves more to an incremental update, which typically focus upon bringing the product into better alignment with the competition through required fixes and new, but not unique features that will expand the company's opportunities within the marketplace.

• IBM should call attention to the fact that, with its recent release of LotusLive iNotes and its announced intent to bring Lotus Notes into the cloud as a full SaaS solution, it is keeping pace with Microsoft relative to cloud-based collaboration. However, IBM must seek to better integrate its premise and cloud messaging solutions, which today are sold and managed individually.

• Rivals, most notably IBM and Google, should call attention to the fact that Microsoft is only now beginning to embraced the current market trend toward rich user profiles. Stemming from the popularity of social networking platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn, enterprise messaging vendors are using information-rich profiles to facilitate tasks such as expertise location and team building. Microsoft will not be able to employ such capabilities until it releases SharePoint Server 2010 in H1 2010.

• Google should point out that it already delivers many capabilities promised by Exchange Server 2010, most notably Google Voice, which provides voice-to-text capabilities, as well as e-mail conversation threading and outbound rules (Gmail Goggles, which is akin to MailTips). Likewise, Apple should point out that it already offers a tried and tested online collaboration and messaging platform, MobileMe (formerly .Mac), which offers these advanced, Web-based messaging capabilities.

CLIENTS ONLY

Competitive Positives and Concerns

Recommended Vendor Actions

| Client access - Full report in Collaboration and Conferencing | More information

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