CRN Interview: Paul Flessner, Microsoft

Microsoft's Paul Flessner sat down with Editor in Chief Michael Vizard and Industry Editor Barbara Darrow at the recent TechEd 2003 show to discuss developments at the show and competitive challenges for the software company. Flessner, who was senior vice president of Microsoft's Server Platform Division at the time of this interview, has since been assigned to lead the Exchange, SQL and eBusiness Divisions at Microsoft.

CRN: All of these add-ons to the Windows 2003 server,DRM, the RTC stuff,were originally supposed to be part of the server. It's starting to sound like there will be separate pricing. Can you talk about pricing and packaging and how that will be delivered?

FLESSNER: Not in any depth. We're still working through it. Bundling is a good thing to a point, and then there's overbundling. Customers start to feel like, 'Hey, wait a minute. We don't want to pay for all this stuff if we're not going to use it.' And that's a fine line we struggle with a lot.

CRN: So, what's segmented today is mainstream tomorrow?

FLESSNER: And you always have that option to move things back in. Moving them out is not really possible [laughter], so if we're going to err, we'll err to move them in, which has its own set of trickiness with the Justice Department.

CRN: You acknowledged that the release of Yukon, the next-generation SQL Server, has slipped into late next year. In this economic climate, do people care?

FLESSNER: There were some customers who were disappointed. They were starting to get excited about the feature set. But customers,especially those on the server side,will take quality over a rush any day of the week.

CRN: There's some competitive stuff going on in messaging, with Lotus getting out its Next-Gen Mail and Oracle offering its mail [based on RDBMS technology], and you're now saying Kodiak [next-generation Exchange Server] won't be out until 2006.

FLESSNER: Yeah. It's out there a ways. Lotus has been a follower on this. ... We announced first,whether they get it to market first, that'll be interesting. ... We're going through a pretty significant rethink of the architecture around Exchange and what it means to sit on SQL Server and integration with SharePoint Portal Services and other information worker stuff,mail, calendaring. You want to think integrated communication collaboration, not mail.

CRN: To be fair, Lotus does now have DB2 and WebSphere-based mail out there. And Oracle as well with its collaboration suite.

FLESSNER: On top of DB2? That's not at all the same thing. They're just trying to redirect I/O; that's shallow stuff.

CRN: WebSphere has good brand recognition. How can you combat that? You're still a year away from full Jupiter, your proposed e-commerce/content management suite.

FLESSNER: I can only win when I ship. I tell it like it is, but then nobody believes me until they see our integration. The fact [is] that IBM doesn't expend a lot of engineering energy, at least in R&D, to make those things integrate. ... They have a big services organization, they make a lot of money integrating that stuff, and the reality is we don't have a big services organization and don't want to make money integrating it. We want to make money on software.

CRN: But you have an army of partners who make a lot of money on integration.

FLESSNER: But they would rather make money on value-adds on top rather than spending time on integration. Integration is quick, high-turn.

CRN: The Microsoft [business applications] push is putting you in the platform group in an interesting position with your ISV partners.

FLESSNER: It's OK. I can't say some partners aren't uncomfortable. But we really are in the small and medium space, and anyone who thinks otherwise is just silly. We're just not in the enterprise space with MBS [Microsoft Business Solutions] products. It's never been a secret that my strategy for penetrating small and medium businesses is a solution. Customers there don't buy databases, they buy accounting systems.

CRN: Will Windows/Office/SharePoint 2003 finally spark buying?

FLESSNER: The server market is different. You don't have huge waves of upgrades. There are upgrades over a period of time. But believe me, there are plenty of people out there on NT 4 who are ready to move.