Microsoft's challenge lies beyond the desktop

At its recent Management Summit, the vendor showed it intends to take utility computing seriously.

Microsoft is getting serious about management software. That's either terrific news or a real cause for concern, depending on who you are.

You don't get to be the largest software vendor in with world without one or two problems.

The first is that Microsoft's ubiquitous desktop products lack the sort of management features that some administrators take for granted. Second, the company has to maintain a steep growth rate to keep the shareholders happy.

And finally, Microsoft wants to diversify. In the case of management software this means it wants the same sort of features that have made Unix the market leader in the data centre and a formidable rival in the server market.

As one Microsoft customer said at the firm's second annual Management Summit in Las Vegas recently, when Redmond decides to do something, the whole weight of the business is brought to bear. Witness the browser wars of the mid to late 1990s.

Microsoft has understood the need for good management, especially when it comes to servers.

But although it already has solid products, the firm is still enthusiastically talking about products that are several years down the line, as well as those it is likely to release soon.

Systems Management Server (SMS) and Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) will eventually be combined as Microsoft System Center, and both products will go through at least one revision each before this happens.

SMS 2003, which has already been delayed, will ship in the third quarter of this year. MOM 2004 will be up and running next year.

To add to the acronyms is Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), a little further away on the horizon.

Cameron Haight, research director at Gartner Group, encompasses all of these products as Real Time Infrastructure (RTI).

Haight defines RTI as utility computing - easily scalable, transparent computing that is more about the service offered than the hardware and software used. He expects the concept to reach fruition by 2010.

Microsoft is by no means the most established or the most successful leader in RTI. Sun is another late entry to a market dominated by Hewlett Packard (HP), with its Adaptive Infrastructure and IBM, with its Autonomic Computing and Computing On-demand strategies.

Sun's contribution is N1, said Haight. And its Sun ONE (Open Net Environment) concept is also in the mix.

"Sun is great at developing core technologies. The industry is littered with its technology and development tools," said Haight.

"But it doesn't have a stack to protect in the way that Microsoft or Oracle do. Sun can offer more control. People favour functionality over standards at the moment."

All this talk of utility computing may sound strangely familiar. In the world of data networking, both Bay Networks and Newbridge Networks started talking about 'Webtone' and resource management as far back as 1997.

The idea of networking, and more recently computing, being treated as a utility, rather than a disparate collection of servers or switches, is not new.

However, Kirill Tatarinov, corporate vice-president of the Microsoft enterprise management division, and the creator of BMC's Patrol management software, said the way Microsoft approaches this space is different.

"We are coming to this from a software perspective. We are not interested in billable hours. We get the licence fee, and our partners get paid for the value they add," he said.

Tatarinov pointed to integration partners such as Unisys and Avenade, a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture. Appointed as the first two Microsoft Solutions Management Partners, both are capable of selling SMS and MOM, and adding their own value to the sale.

There are also other companies out there creating niche management products. BMC's Patrol software and Computer Associates' Unicenter products are both good examples of how ISVs have managed to carve out a niche in the management space.

Yet that niche is changing. Sumir Karayi, managing director of ISV 1E, believes the large players that have dominated the ISV market are in for a tough time. "That said, as soon as Microsoft fills niches that the big ISVs have owned for years, other niches will open up," he said.

Karayi sees a future for smaller, more flexible companies, such as his own, as third-party suppliers. As a five-year-old firm started by ex-Microsoft employees, 1E has already won contracts with large businesses, including British Airways.

It achieved this by offering fixes and products that fill in the gaps not addressed by SMS and MOM, Microsoft's core management products.

Martin Dey, a senior product manager at Microsoft, agreed that this is a good niche for the smaller ISV to get into.

"We can't talk about larger (ISVs) without talking about frameworks - and that's the problem. There's the vendor out there that acquires and acquire in order to fix problems with its software," he said.

1E is taking a different approach, employing a small team of software architects in the UK and larger teams of offshore developers in India to build new applications at great speed.

By far the most prominent partner for Microsoft in this space is management software vendor NetIQ.

But remembering Citrix, and countless other software partners in the past, always gives rise to the concern that the lumbering Microsoft gorilla will roll over in its sleep and crush the smaller firm to death.

James Governor, principle analyst at RedMonk, said: "I don't think it will happen in the foreseeable future. Things haven't been easy for Citrix of late, but it would never have got as big as it is today without Microsoft.

"It's the same for NetIQ. In so many ways, it has benefited from partnership. Companies always have to be aware of running in front of the bulldozer, and I think NetIQ is very aware of any risk."

The difference in Microsoft's approach to the market to that of its competitors is purely down to the nature of its business.

IBM has a huge integration business in the shape of IBM Global Services. IBM, Sun and HP all have hardware sales to consider as well. Microsoft, on the other hand, just has desktop and server software sales to worry about.

The software vendor also has a big advantage. It owns the desktop space at the moment, and that still counts for a great deal. The next struggle for Microsoft is in the data centre, and a solid management offering is vital to success in that market.

SMS 2003
The new version of Systems Management Server (SMS) will include support for both handheld and laptop computing environments.

Some clever throttling and management techniques will allow 'push' downloads of new software packages to be stopped and restarted, or not installed at all if the connected device has little bandwidth to spare.

SMS 2003 is being beta tested by eight companies, with more than 25,000 employees between them. Of these, Microsoft is the largest beta site, with more than 11,000 users being administrated via SMS.

Other features include improved support for Active Directory, the ability to roll out new desktop operating systems to bare bones machines.

Administrators can install a new desktop image from scratch over a network, rather than trawling around with a wallet of compact discs.

From the reseller's point of view, this feature has vast potential. Not only can management and outsourced agreements be simplified, but keeping tabs on the number and types of licences used can make billing, and paying Microsoft, a lot easier.