The soon-to-be-dead Windows Live OneCare wasn't a failure, Microsoft folks
are saying -- it just didn't succeed because people in developing countries
couldn't afford it. Uh, do what, now? Hey, we don't get it, either...but check
out the furious spinning for yourself
here.
Posted by Lee Pender on December 03, 20080 comments
Finally, something having to do with unified communications makes sense -- because
it really isn't focused on UC at all.
We've mentioned here before that we
just don't get UC, and we kind of doubt that anybody else really does, either
-- including a lot of the marketers who work for UC vendors. But one vendor
that's more or less in the UC space is finally making sense to us, primarily
by attaching an actual practical application for UC.
We're written about Interactive
Intelligence before, and we were pleased when a couple of folks from the
company made the trip to Framingham to see RCPU a couple of weeks back. What
they talked about was the first thing even remotely UC-related that has seemed
to us capable of generating real value for customers.
Simply put, Interactive Intelligence wants to tie UC with business process
automation. In fact, the company is pretty much getting into the BPA business
with a little UC on the side. The basic idea is to use UC's find-me-anywhere
functionality to automate processes. So, instead of just letting one worker
know how to get hold of another worker at a given time, Interactive Intelligence's
system would automatically route a process -- say, a claim at an insurance company
-- to the right person at the right place...at the right time.
"In a manual process, there's a lot of human latency and inefficiency,"
Joseph A. Staples, Interactive Intelligence's senior vice president of worldwide
marketing, told RCPU in our meeting. "The way the process gets automated
is the system knows what happens in the next step."
Now, see, this makes sense to us -- and it seems like a practical application
for UC. Instead of just telling Worker A that it's best to reach Worker B by
instant messenger in a given moment, this system, which Interactive Intelligence
will call Interaction Process Automation, will actually do some something practical
by tying business processes to UC functionality. The company plans to have a
product by the middle of 2009.
Maybe other vendors are doing this -- Staples allowed that his company will
soon be competing, on some level, with like likes of Oracle via Siebel -- and,
after all, BPA in and of itself is nothing new. So we'd love to hear from anybody
and everybody who's doling something similar.
But the UC angle, if we've understood it correctly, sounds unique to us at
this point. And it's the first time we've understood how a company could get
any significant value out of a product in the UC space. It's the process automation
that matters here -- not strictly the ability to find people when they're
in their cars or working at home.
Oh, and by the way, partners, there will be plenty of opportunity for you to
do significant customization work, and Interactive Intelligence does have a
channel-sales strategy and a partner program.
There are some potential hang-ups. Staples sees his company's vision as being
an alternative to enterprise resource planning, rather than complementary to
it. And while we see where he's coming from, especially regarding Interactive
Intelligence's SMB sweet spot, we're thinking that some ERP integration might
not be the worst idea at some point.
Still, everything considered, this is the first UC solution we've seen that
makes sense -- mainly because somebody finally realized that UC all by itself
isn't really that useful after all.
What's your take on unified communications? Is your company doing anything
useful with it? Do you have a product or story you'd like to pitch? We're all
eyes at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on December 03, 20082 comments
No, Barbara Walters isn't prominently involved...as far as we know. This View
is a
new VMware
product.
Posted by Lee Pender on December 03, 20080 comments
Seriously, Microsoft's not kidding about this patch stuff. If you haven't been
on top of it, you'd better read
this.
Posted by Lee Pender on December 02, 20080 comments
We'd like to thanks the
Times of London, old chaps, for giving us something
to write about in what's bound to be a slow time leading up to the holidays.
Some Times reporter said this week that Microsoft is going to pay $20
billion to buy Yahoo's search business -- a claim quickly refuted in the gosh-darn
American Wall Street Journal (well, in one of its blogs, anyway), by
a couple of investors who were supposed to be involved in the deal. All the
relevant links, plus a nifty news story, are here
on RCPmag.com.
So, yeah...$20 billion for part of a company that had a market cap of $16 billion
on Monday before the market got hammered again? Not likely, we're thinking.
Will Microsoft make a(nother) play for Yahoo's search business, or for all of
Yahoo? Hey, anything could happen -- but we're thinking that the WSJ
has probably trumped the Times this time. And we're happy that this story
is something that vaguely resembles news in December.
Posted by Lee Pender on December 02, 20080 comments
The question isn't so much when Vista SP2 is coming out as it is whether anybody
cares that it's coming out. But if you do care,
April
might be your lucky month.
Posted by Lee Pender on December 02, 20081 comments
So, OneCare is dead, but Microsoft's effort to be a security vendor is still
alive. Sort of. Microsoft will replace OneCare next year with a set of
free
security applications. Or maybe Microsoft will finally just take steps to
secure its own applications the way users have wanted it to for a long time.
In any case, there's the potential for trouble in all this.
The immediate reaction from many observers has been to suggest that Morro,
the code name for OneCare's free successor, will be lawsuit bait for Symantec
and McAfee -- you know, those companies that have made a living doing what
Microsoft wouldn't or couldn't to secure Windows -- and antitrust regulation
fodder for the ravenous European Union.
Redmond has already started the spin machine, suggesting that rivals' products
will
still be way better than Morro, which will just be a simple set of tools
for people who won't pay for anti-virus, anyway. Symantec and friends, whose
stock prices took a hit on the Morro news (not that they were alone in seeing
share prices fall this week), predictably played Morro as being no
big deal.
And it probably isn't. First of all, Microsoft isn't going to introduce anything
that might even seem like a legitimate Symantec killer. There are lots of reasons
for this, but let's just confine ourselves for now to saying that Microsoft
likely won't want to throw another meaty bone to the EU regulation dogs.
Folks in Redmond have learned a lot from their various battles with government
regulators, and their attempts to slide in and take over markets aren't as blatant
as they used to be. Plus, Microsoft has a right -- a responsibility, really
-- to provide some level of basic security. And making it free actually seems
less monopolistic and more customer-friendly than making people pay for it.
But that leaves open, of course, greater questions: Where will Microsoft's
security efforts stop? And where should they stop? Symantec and McAfee, among
others, won't go away if Microsoft seriously decides to shore up its products
on its own; the big security vendors have huge businesses these days that go
way beyond making Windows work. So why shouldn't Microsoft improve built-in
security for its own application infrastructure? Most users would probably say
that it should -- and should have a long time ago.
That's not to say that Microsoft won't eventually try a more significant security
land grab -- there is, after all, a hosted
security suite on the way -- but for now, Morro seems pretty innocuous.
Whether rivals, regulators and the industry will see it that way is another
matter.
Posted by Lee Pender on November 20, 20081 comments
It's a little company called Transitive that's
falling
into Armonk's hands. (By the way, we're going to start referring to IBM
as "Armonk" the way we refer to Microsoft as "Redmond"...just
because.)
Posted by Lee Pender on November 20, 20080 comments
Just in time for a deep global recession, it's a new enterprise software application
from Microsoft! This time, it's small-business-focused Dynamics NAV that's getting
an update.
Seriously, this doesn't seem like the best time for Redmond to introduce a
new enterprise resource planning offering, but Chris Caren, general manager
of marketing and product management for Microsoft Dynamics, isn't freaking out.
"We're just doing a lot more reconfirming [that] deals are as solid as
we think they are," Caren told RCPU in a face-to-face meeting in Framingham,
Mass. "Deals don't go away; they just get slowed down. Decision-making
processes are a little more extended and involved."
Caren's confidence is encouraging, and it may very well be that NAV 2009 will
fare better than its Dynamics cousins because of NAV's SMB target audience.
Still, Dynamics' recent
revenue struggles and Microsoft's 0 percent financing offer for the Dynamics
product lines seem to be signs that the decision-making process is becoming
very slow indeed.
Still, Microsoft has a not unappealing message with NAV 2009, and it's one
we've heard many times before from more than one ERP vendor: ERP does an organization
no good if users won't touch it.
And still, a lot of ERP applications sit on a virtual shelf in many companies.
Caren cites an oft-noted statistic: According to AMR Research Inc., only 10
percent of a given company's employees on average are licensed to use ERP applications,
and of that 10 percent, only half actually use the apps.
Microsoft has long developed its four Dynamics suites with the goal of increasing
employee usage of ERP and therefore increasing its value in an organization.
That theme continues with the release of NAV 2009, which Microsoft announced
on Nov. 19 and will become generally available on Dec. 1. NAV is generally aimed
at companies with 50 to 1,000 employees that don't need international ERP deployments,
Caren said.
The 2009 version of the suite brings further enhancements to its user interface,
which looks increasingly similar to that of NAV's up-market cousin, AX, Caren
said. The idea is to make the ERP interface as Microsoft Office-like and familiar
as possible to users in order to ease their transition to using the back-office
software. "It looks like a very modern, consumerized, Web-based experience,"
he said.
While Caren said that the enhanced interface is the biggest change in NAV compared
to prior versions, he also notes that NAV 2009 will include for the first time
a database layer that embeds SQL Server. That has allowed Microsoft to build
in business intelligence capabilities that weren't present in previous versions,
Caren said.
"Our mid-market strategy for BI is to take it to market through Dynamics,"
Caren said. And by embedding SQL Server and BI capabilities in NAV, he said,
Microsoft is helping companies skip some of the more arduous steps in the deployment
of business applications. "The advantage of embedding is you have a pre-defined
data model. You can build in all the data models and security. The heavy lifting
is done when you embed BI into a business application," Caren said.
Caren said that Microsoft can't necessarily keep up feature for feature with
other BI vendors, but he points to simplicity as an advantage Dynamics has over
other systems: "Functionally we're at 85 percent" in comparison to
some BI competitors, he said, "but we transform ease of use and we have
price points that are at 20 percent of [those of other] BI tools. Our goal is
not to replace high-end data mining. We want to make [BI] an everyday technology
that all information workers access."
Well, all information workers whose companies are spending money on enterprise
software, anyway.
What's your outlook for Microsoft Dynamics and enterprise software in a tough
economy? Share your thoughts at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on November 19, 20081 comments
It probably won't affect the channel except at the very low end, and even there
partners who are trying to make money strictly by reselling software are probably
going broke, anyway. But the
opening
of Microsoft's online store in the U.S. might still make a few partners
queasy.
Sure, the prices are high, and there's no threat to the services element that
brings in most of partners' revenues, anyway, but Microsoft going into the direct-sales
business in the U.S. -- it had already opened stores in Europe -- just might
not set right with partners who are already concerned about Redmond's not-necessarily-channel-friendly
cloud computing strategy.
There's always that nagging question: If Microsoft is willing to cannibalize
retailers' business, when and how might it turn on the rest of the channel?
Hey, we know that Microsoft still makes the overwhelming majority of its revenue
through partners and has probably the best channel program in the business.
Microsoft still seems committed to keeping partners happy, so there's no panic
here. There's not even much suspicion. But there are tiny, lingering questions
that weren't there so much a few years ago. That's all we're saying.
Posted by Lee Pender on November 19, 20080 comments
Jerry Yang is
out
as CEO of Yahoo...which is, perhaps, a sign that Microsoft
might
be back in to buy the company -- eventually.
Posted by Lee Pender on November 19, 20080 comments