Microsoft Pushes ISVs To Get Vista-Ready
Hours after Bill Gates made headlines for telling attendees at a conference in Cape Town, South Africa, that he feels there's an "80 percent" chance Vista will make its January deadline for wide release, company executives took the stage at Microsoft's Velocity 2006 partner conference in Boston to exhort developers to get cracking on Vista support.
"With Vista, you've got to be testing your existing applications for compatibility now," Sanjay Parthasarathy, Microsoft's corporate vice president of developer and platform evangelism, said in a keynote speech. To underline the point, Microsoft placed a "developer jump-start kit" CD on every seat in the conference hall.
Some ISVs have jumped in and plan to certify for Vista as quickly as possible, though most developers acknowledge that they anticipate a very gradual customer pickup.
"We're seeing what [research firm] Gartner is: It will be a long migration for enterprises," said Paul Neutz, director of business development at Attachmate, based in Seattle. "We did an internal survey of our customer advisory council and got a whole range of responses, from 'we're testing it out' to 'we just deployed XP.' "
Still, Attachmate is allocating development resources to have its host access and terminal emulation products certified for Vista later this year, although it expects most customers to remain on older Windows versions for at least a year after Vista's launch.
Several ISVs at the conference said they're handling the migration lag by developing their applications to run on Microsoft's current and upcoming platforms, with a more limited feature set on the older software.
"[Moving to SharePoint 2007] is a big platform commitment, and it's going to take time. So we've tried to make many of our applications work with reduced functionality on SharePoint 2003," said Tom Jenkins, CEO of content management software maker OpenText. "For large corporations, it's hard for them to do such a big switch. It's almost like a rocket shuttle launch. They're planning their Office migrations two years out. As best we can, we're going to split between the two environments." Early Vista supporters also are wrestling with the challenge of developing against a moving target. Systems integrator InterKnowlogy is supporting one of the first Microsoft customers to go into production with an application built on the whole stack of software Microsoft has in beta: Vista, Office 2007, .Net 3.0 and SharePoint 2007. The Scripps Research Institute is using a tool that InterKnowlogy built to model and annotate cancer cells.
InterKnowlogy CEO Tim Huckaby raved about the development speed and advanced functionality that the Vista wave of technology enabled--and then he issued a disclaimer. "No one else should run this type of stuff," he said. "We are holding their hands. I'm not saying this stuff is ready for production. We're blocked on a number of bugs in SharePoint. But this application has helped them enough that it's worth going through the pain."
ISVs building applications tied to Vista's new features said the delays are frustrating but not crippling. For instance, SourceCode Technology Holdings' next version of its K2.net workflow software makes extensive use of the Windows Presentation Foundation and other Vista-specific functionality.
"We show it to customers, and they say, 'When will it be available?' " said Jeff Shuey, SourceCode's global alliance director. "Then we turn to Microsoft and say, 'When will it be available?' "
When asked about Vista's fluctuating release timetable, partners generally say they'd rather that Microsoft wait until it gets the software right. They also note slipping ship dates are hardly a shock for veteran Microsoft partners.
Microsoft doesn't see Vista's long gestation curbing its uptake. Microsoft's Parthasarathy projected in his talk that a half-billion PCs will be running Vista within two years of its release, including 300 million new PCs and 200 million upgraded desktops.
For at least a few partners, Microsoft's delays are a boon. Microsoft Gold partner Simcrest, based in Richardson, Texas, sells an assortment of Microsoft add-ons, including Print2Excel, a tool that imports data into Excel while preserving its formatting. Office 2007 betas haven't included such functionality so far, but Simcrest sales consultant John Stevens has heard whispers that the finished product will offer import tools like Print2Excel.
"I'm hoping to hear more about it at the show," Stevens said. "If that's the case, then they can keep taking their time."