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Partners Get Their Marching Orders on Marketing Vista

Windows Vista or else, says Ballmer to partners.

• By Scott Bekker
• July 24, 2006

A major operating system release is the biggest of Microsoft channel opportunities. Analysts anticipate that between 100 million and 130 million PCs will ship with Windows Vista by the end of 2007 and the release is expected to stimulate hardware, software and services purchases. In the run-up to a major launch, Microsoft spends years educating ISVs and corporate developers, months preparing solution providers and IT administrators and weeks of intensive end-user marketing. With the OS currently scheduled for full release early next year, the company's efforts to ready the solution provider channel are in full swing now.

In a series of training presentations available on its partner site, Microsoft has outlined its marketing campaigns for the OS so that partners can begin crafting their own business plans and developing sales and marketing campaigns.

While the snazzy "Aero Glass" interface gets the most attention, Microsoft wants partners to focus business customers' attention on the security and reliability that the company contends were the top priority in this release, which has been five years in development.

Offering a "sneak preview" of Microsoft's marketing plans, the presentations note that the company's marketing approach centers on working with partners to deliver specific "customer scenarios" for Windows Vista.

"These Customer Scenarios represent identified hot spots of customer demand where Windows Vista delivers functionality above and beyond previous versions of Windows, and where partners can add their products and services to deliver a complete package of value to customers," a Microsoft presentation notes.

Microsoft is tailoring those scenarios to two audiences: small businesses and midsize/enterprise organizations. Continued next page

Small-business scenarios emphasize basic functions, including:

• Data back-up and security
• Mobility and collaboration
• Sales and marketing
• Financial management

Midsize/enterprise scenarios emphasize ways that customers can:

• Optimize desktop infrastructure
• Enable mobile workers
• Improve security and compliance
• Find and use information

The first two small-business scenarios -- data back-up and security and mobility and collaboration -- are fairly self-explanatory. Both depend on new OS features that partners can enable and enhance. In those areas, Microsoft is trying to provide small businesses with the IT practices for security and disaster recovery and the advanced capabilities in mobility and collaboration that larger organizations have used for years.

For the sales and marketing scenario, Microsoft is emphasizing the ability of small businesses, with partner help, to respond faster to business opportunities and stay connected to customers. Some of this capability depends on a cross-sell -- Vista features integrated with CRM applications and sales-management applications from Microsoft and others. But a few capabilities, such as enhanced Windows Search and Windows MeetingSpace, are billed as stand-alone improvements that partners can help small business customers develop into sales and marketing aids.

Likewise, the financial-management customer scenario has cross-sell and stand-alone angles for partners. In addition to offering integration with financial-management applications and online-payment services, partners can add value through synchronization manager functionality that Microsoft says will help small companies streamline business processes and share financial information with outside parties. Microsoft says that Vista's Windows Presentation Foundation will also make it easier to visually analyze financial data through charts and graphs.

While small-business customer scenarios focus on the basics, midsize- and enterprise-company scenarios revolve around more sophisticated capabilities.

In previous releases, Microsoft emphasized improving ROI or cutting TCO. The company's first large-company scenario for Vista promotes similar benefits, but this time in acronym-free verbiage ("Optimize Your Desktop Infrastructure"). Highlights include extending Group Policy to cover power settings, USB devices and wireless network policies; user-account control prompts requiring administrative credentials to install software or drivers; and self-tuning and self-diagnostics to reduce support incidents.

While the goal for small businesses is enabling mobility, a second larger-company scenario emphasizes improving the experience of already-mobile employees. Hard-drive encryption will help keep company data safe if laptop computers are lost or stolen. Wireless network configuration is simplified, while data synchronization and mobile collaboration are emphasized for this audience.

The security scenario is combined with compliance for larger companies, acknowledging the increasing regulatory requirements they face. According to Microsoft, an enhanced EventLogger using XML will allow auditing of all modifications to files and systems.

Finally, search capabilities are more central to Microsoft's Vista marketing plans for enterprise and midsize companies. That capability is folded into the Sales and Marketing customer scenario for small businesses, but for enterprises, "Find and Use Information" serves as a stand-alone scenario.