Microsoft Shift Puts Ozzie Front And Center

Ray Ozzie's new gig as Microsoft Chief Software Architect exemplifies the company's reset course in a Software-as-a-Service world.

Ozzie takes on the title from company co-founder and Chairman Bill Gates as part of a two-year transition that will give Gates more time for philanthropic work. Craig Mundie is now chief research and strategy officer. Both Ozzie and Mundie had been chief technology officers.

"My role will be changing and expanding," Ozzie told CRN last Thursday night.

But the software services effort, which Ozzie already leads, will continue full speed ahead. Ozzie is known as the father of Notes, a client/server collaboration tool now owned by IBM. "The services push will continue to be central because it touches most of the products and services around here," he said.

Solution providers that are flexible and adapt to change will flourish, even while facing the threat of disintermediation in a SaaS world.

"If the value that the partner is adding is purely infrastructural, you have to pay attention to what infrastructure changes are happening. In this particular case, Microsoft itself is being impacted by infrastructure changes in terms of moving things to services," Ozzie said.

The broad, horizontal nature of initial Windows Live and Office Live services will provide plenty of partner opportunity in value-added features, he added.

"Solution partners can use their SharePoint expertise and connection to customers to build solutions on our back-end infrastructure," he said.

Partners and vendors alike in the SaaS realm worry about losing account control, a point Ozzie acknowledged. "My simple rule of thumb, it goes back to Notes, is that the more a partner is bonded to the customer through domain expertise, the more it'll be a solid, sustainable relationship. Partners can offer customers new solutions whenever the technology changes."

Over time, Ozzie will take on more product reviews. "I already lead reviews on things in the area of services stuff, and Bill does a lot. As we move forward, Bill will still do some reviews alone in areas he cares about," he said.

"Some we'll do jointly. The reality, though, is by the end of two years, reviews will be done differently."

Asked to clarify, Ozzie said, "I tend to be deeper in product design than Bill. Because of our backgrounds, he has much broader average impact and we'll take advantage of this to restructure."