Microsoft Details Windows.Net, .Net Server Lineup For Fiscal Year 2003

Microsoft

Paul Flessner, senior vice president of Microsoft's .Net Enterprise Servers, said Thursday at the company's annual financial analyst meeting that Microsoft will hire 22 percent more sales professionals to sell the servers, and is investing $500 million to gear up partners for the big server push. He also said Microsoft is planning a $500 million television advertising campaign aimed at pitching servers at business decision makers.

Noting increased competition with IBM and Linux in the server realm--with little mention of Oracle and Sun Microsystems on the server software side--Flessner said Microsoft has its own suite of application infrastructure products aimed at better competing with IBM's WebSphere.

"WebSphere is a lot of products branded under a single name, and I'm sure IBM is on track to integrate those products tighter, as are we," said Flessner, alluding to Microsoft's planned "Jupiter" suite. "It's an important category. IBM has a slight lead there today," he said.

Microsoft has a bigger lead on developer tools, Flessner said. "IBM has minor market share, but they have an offering," he said. "IBM and Linux together are formidable competition to Microsoft. It's not just Linux alone or IBM alone."

Microsoft also plans to release SQL Server 2000 Notification Services for SQL Server, now in beta testing, in fiscal year '03, said Flessner.

Another Microsoft executive, Eric Rudder, noted that Microsoft will ship an "Everett" release of Visual Studio.Net that will be tightly integrated with the Windows.Net server.

The software company also has undertaken a major effort to unify its products aimed at managing distributed Web service applications. The "server manager" project will "understand the context of the application" across the client and server, Rudder said.

Flessner said the releases of the operating system development tools and servers are synchronized. The next wave of OS, server and development tools will be designed around the "Yukon" XML store, he added.

"Yukon is the most ambitious development effort at Microsoft," said executives, who were quick to note that the forthcoming release of Windows.Net--slated for the first quarter of 2003--represents a major milestone since it will be the first Windows product to fully incorporate the .Net Framework. "It will make Web services mainstream," Flessner said.