Ballmer: .Net Server Is On Track For 1Q Launch

Microsoft

"Everything looks very, very, very, very, very, very, very good for Q1 launch," said Ballmer in a question-and- answer period with several thousand partners here at Fusion 2002.

Microsoft's aggressive .Net push was a big focus during the four-day show, which ended Monday. Solution providers here say they are seeing significant deployment of Web services using the .Net platform as a foundation.

Part of the .Net initiative is to make Microsoft Office the bridge to connect the front office to the back office, Ballmer said. He conceded that the current design of Office has not made that an easy task, but said that Microsoft is working on unifying storage technology to make Office what he called a "relational XML store."

"You might say that is a contradiction," Ballmer said of this effort, "but that is really what we are trying to bring together, the breadth of sort of a relational approach and an XML data store. Office will talk to that in its entirety," he said.

That .Net development effort will result in better searches of critical information using Microsoft's Office, he said. "We'll have one storage system instead of doing HTML, the file system, the database system, the e-mail system, they all today have their own search to manage, their own query, their own programmability, etc., and that is part of the thing that stands between getting Office to be a front end for [applications such as payroll processing or decision support or workflow applications."

In addition, Ballmer said Microsoft is in the early stages of developing a "broader line of business intelligence products."

Ballmer reiterated his support to get Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) and partners to work more closely together. "Any idea that improves integration between MCS and our partner community in front of the customer I think that is a great idea."