Microsoft TechEd Off and Running

Microsoft's TechEd 2006 kicked off in Boston with a pre-conference keynote by Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie, who spoke on the topic of how how services will open the door to enterprise infrastructure and applications that are more flexible, agile and cost-effective.

Ozzie referred to this as "service disruption." In a prepared statement, here's some of what Ozzie had to say:

We are rapidly entering a new era in which Internet-based services will transform the way we create, deploy, manage and use information technology. I’ve been referring to this as the "services disruption," and I believe it will give rise to a dramatic shift in the computing and communications landscape that will be felt across this industry and by every market segment, from consumers to small businesses to educational institutions and governments. In particular, I believe that the services disruption will have significant impact on corporate IT and the way we think about both infrastructure and business solutions.

Q: Why is this disruption emerging now?

Ozzie: Like previous technology disruptions, the services disruption is fueled by ongoing innovation and improvement in low-level, enabling technologies like processing power, storage capacity and network bandwidth. Today the telephone in my pocket has a processor that is 10 times faster than the supercomputers I used in college. A decade ago, the state-of-the art was a laptop with an 810-MB hard drive. Today you can buy a 1-GB flash SD card for your camera for $25. Meanwhile, more and more of us have become addicted to our always-on high bandwidth connection at work and at home.

So far, the impact of all of these trends can be seen most clearly in the consumer realm -- in areas like gaming and messaging. To meet the incredible growth in consumer demand for more and better service-based offerings, companies like Microsoft are building vast data centers that are designed to serve hundreds of millions of users, store petabytes worth of information and move trillions of e-mails. The key questions are a) what impact does the consumer services boom have on the way individuals want to work, and what does that mean for corporate IT?, and b) how can companies take advantage of the data center investments to reduce costs and grow revenue?

Q: You said that the services disruption is of particular importance for the enterprise. In what ways?

Ozzie: Combining software plus services is a powerful concept that is extremely well-suited to the needs of today’s business environment. Corporate IT departments continually look for ways to reduce complexity, and they are constantly asked to find ways to drive down costs while driving up agility. Meanwhile, they have to help their organizations adapt to the realities of the global economy, meet the needs of an increasingly mobile workforce, and fulfill the requirement to integrate more easily with partners and suppliers. We believe a blended client-server-services approach will help IT departments tackle these challenges with greater flexibility and efficiency.

Q: As the services disruption takes hold, what will the enterprise of the future look like?

Ozzie: IT vendors and IT professionals have traditionally had a view that if it’s inside the firewall it can be managed and if it’s outside the firewall, it represents a potential threat to corporate security. Services will provide IT with new options to extend management outside the firewall to registered devices, software and systems, regardless of where they reside. This will be critical as people increasingly look to bring personal laptops, smart phones, and USB memory keys into the enterprise because they find them useful. Services will enable people to use a variety of self-supported devices that that they find useful while giving IT the tools to protect the company’s interests.

We’re entering an era where there is tremendous opportunity for IT in the realm of what I call Management as a Service or "MaaS." These are Internet-based management services that can be federated with existing enterprise management systems and that can reach out and touch a wide range of software and devices. An example of the power and value of MaaS can be found today in our Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services, which includes anti-virus, anti-spam, archiving, disaster recovery and encryption capabilities, all of which can be delivered and managed purely as an Internet service.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 07:58 AM  Permalink