The Schwartz Reportby Jeffrey Schwartz, Executive Editor
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Microsoft Targets Mission-Critical Systems
Microsoft yesterday launched what it calls Premier Mission Critical Support Service, which, as the name implies, is intended to help users architect and maintain apps and systems that require constant availability.
These long-term services are for those who want to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to perform architectural reviews, implementation and monitoring services thereafter, as reported by my colleague Kurt Mackie.
I spoke with Norm Judah, CTO of Microsoft Consulting Services to try to get a better understanding of where partners would fit into this service. When asked if they would be certified to potentially deliver these architectural reviews, he sounded doubtful -- and certainly not in the short term.
"Probably not, at least not initially, because the solutions engineer, the guy we are going to keep on site is generally deeply involved in doing that work to have that context," Judah explained. "There's an opportunity for us, when we have much more knowledge about the system to really investigate what a sell-through would look like, but I don't think we are ready for that. In many cases, the customers are asking for us to do this because they want Microsoft's skin in the game."
That said, Judah does see partners delivering some of the remediation services. "Remediation might be something simple such as tune a database but it could be something very complex, like you need to re-architect the middle tier of your commerce application. Those are all partner opportunities, driven by the customer. That is really the customer's choice who they want to do that with. If they have an existing partner that they work with, maybe it's the guy who wrote the application, no problem in doing that and we would work very closely with them taking the output of their remediation."
What's your take on this new service? Drop me a line at [email protected].
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 11, 2010