Solution Providers: New Microsoft Knowledge Worker Group Makes Sense

The time is ripe to rationalize all the piece-parts of technology that could help office workers find and reuse the data that is often stored, but hard to locate, in corporate data coffers, they said.

The thinking behind Microsoft's Knowledge Workers Solution Group (see related story), which is staffing up now in the old Visio headquarters in Seattle, is that since a huge percentage of "knowledge workers" use Office to create and save data and are also using other tools such as Microsoft Project, there might be better ways to combine the features and functions of these diverse products.

"It certainly would be advantageous if Microsoft were to package up all these benefits in a solution," said Andy Vabulus, president of I.B.I.S., an Atlanta Microsoft Gold certified partner. "I agree with solutions selling. We've used this approach for close to nine years, and this puts them better in synch."

Another motivation for the group's formation is to address Microsoft's changing application upgrade cycle. Standard and Poor's has reported that growth of Office XP was 1 percent and Windows XP slowed to 9 percent last quarter. The reason could be the down economy or proof of market saturation for Office, or a combination of the two factors. In the past, Microsoft has typically registered quarterly growth rates of more than 30 percent, said observers.

The new group, the formation of which has not been disclosed publicly by Microsoft, is the brainchild of Microsoft Group Vice President Jeff Raikes, several sources within the company confirmed.

Solution providers said the group's formation is not surprising given the trend in which Microsoft has packed more and more links to back-end functions into its dominant desktop applications.

"They've enriched Office to handle all the interfaces to SQL and structured data sources and as they bring things in like Visio [charting software, Data Analyzer and Project, they really represent the entire presentation or touch layer," said Frank Cullen, principal with Blackstone and Cullen, another Atlanta-based Microsoft solution provider. At issue now is the wall that separates those user-facing layers from "the ultimate data engines," he said. "It makes sense for Microsoft, which owns the presentation layer, to make it more usable and less confusing."

In some sense, Microsoft is echoing earlier moves by Lotus, now a part of IBM 's Software Group, which blazed the trail positioning Notes and Domino as tools for knowledge management, said industry observers. IBM has since extended that message to include IBM's WebSphere application server and the DB2 database.

Microsoft "needs to rationalize how all [its diverse products work together under a .Net framework," said Matt Cain, vice president of researcher The Meta Group. "And from a competitive standpoint, you have IBM, which I would suggest has a more coherent strategy around knowledge worker and collaboration, particularly given its WebSphere Portal and integration with Lotus products."

The problem with knowledge management then and now is that it is a nebulous term, and no two companies or individuals use the same definition, said solution providers.

"The whole issue of what knowledge management is is really difficult. Ever since Lotus came out with its collaborative solutions, it's been all over the map," said Cullen.

Microsoft's aggressive move to offer not only the customer-facing application and interface but the middleware connecting the application to back-end data could put the squeeze on other companies that have profitably mined that business, said Cullen and other solution providers.

"There are risks to companies like Cognos, who are seeing their margins squeezed by increasingly powerful Excel," he said.