WPC 2007 Nigel Ireland

Ok so I've been a little quiet on the blog since yesterday morning and I assure you that’s because I have been busy and not because I fell a sleep reading the last blog I wrote as I’m sure many others did!

Actually I didn’t blog any of my afternoon sessions yesterday because to be honest I wasn’t that impressed.  One session took us through step by step the customer pain points and the possible solutions of 7 specialisations areas of the Information Worker competency – I didn’t think that it added a lot of value and that any partners sitting in that room should already know those pains and solutions.  The other was really disappointing as I had been looking forward to the first part of the ‘Prepare for Titan’ series and when I got there they simple repeated the CRM break session from the pre-event day!

However things have changed slightly – I’m just after attending a great session – ‘MBS004 – Best Practices for Building and Growing your Microsoft Dynamics Business’. The session was about a survey that Microsoft and IDC completed about the profitability of over 200 partners.  IDC analysed the survey data, split partner practices into different quartiles based on their operational profit margin and used the 1^st quartile practices to define the 8 Best Practices for a Dynamics business.

I’ll share these with you:

1.  Pay Attention to Existing Customers

• In the 1st quartile existing customers are AS important as new customers

 2.  Bias Employee Mix To Sales & Marketing

• The 1st quartile biased their staff towards sales and marketing and in particular the pre-sales and technical sales staff

3.  Watch your labor costs

• 1st quartile compensation lower across most employee types
• Although higher for project managers based on experience

4.    Use Variable Compensation

• In the 1st quartile almost 100% sales and 85% service staff are on commission but they set the lowest targets

5.  Specialise & Augment

• Go into verticals
• Or a solution area
• Augment you business with other solution areas that are complementary to your practices such as IW or AI

6.  Hire Experience … Within Reason

• In 8 out of 12 roles the 1st quartile hire less experienced staff
• They are being cautious of the mix of employees

7.   Manage through the profit valley

• The profit valley - companies in the 10 to 49 employees range are working with a significantly lower operational profit margin than those with 1 to 9 or + 50 employees
• Practices in the 1st quartile do a number of things such as
• Keeping published bill rates low
• Strive for repeatable solutions
• Not overextending (watch the cash)

8 Match Management focus with Practice age.

There were also some lessons to be learnt from the poor performers.

Poor performers tend to:

·         Spend too much on marketing

·         Spend heavily on R & D

·         Unable to reap benefits of R & D yet!

·         Underutilise billable resources

·         Offer high discounts on bill rates

·         Employ less experienced tech consultants and outbound sales staff

·         Have a high employee turn over

There is still more useful information to be gotten from this session – so I would advise you to download the recording of the session on the WPC website when they are available.  There is also a whitepaper on this survey and the analyse that will be available on partner source.

Tracey

• IDC saying 4% server hardware growth
• 15% revenue growth for MS - 19th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth
• Windows Server 69% market share
• Core infrastructure - System Centre up from #8 to #4 in market
• Forefront in Gartner Magic Quadrant
• Application platform - .NET leadership: adoption >73%

Today, greater than 70% of spend is put into just standing still - less than 30% investment going forward.

The new opportunities concern moving from physically managed environment to a logically managed environment - from server to storage to networking.

Discussion of the IO model - Basic (75%), Standardised (24%), Rationalised (1%), Dynamic (0.5%)

(Figures are representative of companies at each stage in terms of MS own research)

Core Infrastructure Key Areas - Identity and Access, Security, Networking, Management, Virtualisation

Partner Win with Windows - some interesting research figures

Gross Profit

• Windows - 26%
• Linux - 41%
• Advanced Infrastructure Certified - 29%

Net Profit

• Windows - 14%
• Linux - 13%
• Advanced Infrastructure Certified - 19%

Windows Server Performance in Market

• IDC says #1 platform for UNIX migration
• ISVs grow revenue 5x faster than Linux
• 1st Qtr was first quarter since IDC started tracking that Windows Server revenue has grown faster than Linux server revenue

Windows Server 2008 - Andy says he is super jazzed (I kid you not - an Englishman supper-jazzed... should be ashamed of himself. Hehe)

• Virtualisation strategy - Virtual Server 2005, SoftGrid, System Centre Virtual Machine Manager
• Virtualisation will be built right into the Server 2008 product with an integrated hypervisor

Emphasising the point that the management technology needs to be the same for physical and virtual. Acknowledges VMWare has great management tools but admins need to run and learn two tool sets. Microsoft can provide end-to-end management tools for all environments.

Demo of Server Core - back to the command line (Linux admins might be smiling wrily at this point!?)

Windows Server virtualisation now supports much more in terms of the resource that can be allocated. More RAM than any other virtualisation technology and support for multi-core CPUs.

Shows System Centre Virtual Machine Manager. Allows conversion of physical to virtual and also VMWare image to Virtual Server image - sweet.

Clarification on the migration issue that's received coverage in press. Quick migration makes P-to-P migration in around six seconds! Trade-off on live migration to ship on time. Quick migration is built into the core product - not an add-on. Quick migration - will allow physical to virtual to physical migrations.

Demo'd the ease with which virtual server resources can be monitored with a showcase on a web based database application. Overall performance of application was broken down clearly to show that the web servers were impacting overall performance. Deployed a further web server and overall performance immediately jumped to an acceptable level - pretty cool.

Microsoft.com already on Server 2008 - 100 million unique users per month.

Launch date of Feb 27th confirmed for Server 2008, SQL 2008, Visual Studio 2008

Now Andy moves on to covering security and management. Talks about the convergence of both of these areas to ensuring uptime in the

Demo of Forefront and System Centre - this was pretty cool.

Mobile worker on an Internet cafe machine to check mail. Logs into secure gateway. Forefront Intelligent Application Gateway 2007 checks the machine he is on and sees problems with AV and critical updates, so machine is given limited access - allows OWA but not Sharepoint access (upload).

On his corporate laptop, he is running Forefront Client Security. AV updates happen through same mechanism as OS updates and patches. Gets fuller access to applcaitions as a trusted endpoint.

IAG 2007 allows access to applications to be controlled granularly. Pre-configured security settings for a crap-load of known applications. So, access to something like MS CRM or even Salesforce can be restricted to read-only (foe example) if certain health indicators are not met. Also talks about multi-vendor AV and spyware engines.

Integration between Forefront and System Centre looks like it will give some very granular security reporting on servers and client machines with full AD integration (of course).

• Desktop - rich UI, offline, personal integration.
• Enterprise - management, compliance, security
• Web - click-to-run, anywhere access, collaboration
• Devices - form factors, universal experience.

User experience - needs to be consistent, powerful and seamless across  multiple devices. Gave example of Exchange -similar experience across  Outlook thick client, OWA web-based client, and Outlook Mobile.

Silverlight demo. HD video streaming with multi  picture-in-picture.  Demonstrates the ability to bring in other data sources with video mash-ups  with targeted advertising. Showed baseball example allowing user to bring in  player stats, fantasy baseball in to onto the video feed. Similar demo shown  on mobile device also. Then a brief demo of flight booking with intuitive map  mash-up and flight times represented as calendar entries rather than a text  list.

*This* is what Conference is all about. A fantastic demo of some real cool  technology.

Some discussion of a continuum between fully on-premise severs, through  hybrid, to wholly off-site. Different partners will fit in different places.

Windows Live Platform -combined Application Services, Foundation Services,  Cloud Infrastructure Services.

Microsoft Software and Services offers:

• Personal Services -Windows Live, Office Live, Popfly, Live Search, Virtual  Earth
• Business Services - Exchange Hosted, managed Communication +  Collaboration, Office Live Small Business, Dynamics live CRM
• Developer Services - Silverlight streaming, Biztalk Services.
• Service Enablers ActiveX, AJAX, Silverlight , .NET , Win32, SoftGrid.

MapPoint demo. Microsoft Partners in Sydney on a mash-up in MapPoint.  Leads through to Silverlight website for a fictitious Partner. Demo of the Got  'hyper 200m image technology. A gigapixel image zooming in real time -crazy  detail!

Part of the website has a Live Messenger window which integrates with an  installed Messenger on one of the sales agents PCs.

Video - Partners talking about Software and Services opportunities. Most of  the benefit seems to centre on speed of deployment and ability to keep apps  updated with hosted options.

Steve closes with a "The Time is Now" message. The Software and Services  journey has already kicked off in the personal space, SME is starting on the  journey, enterprise is now planning for the journey.

He is bullish (surprise, surprise!) on Microsoft's commitment to own this new  growing phenomenon. Interesting to see almost the entire keynote handed  our to this topic-that's probably a measure of the importance MS is putting  on this".

This analyst's assessment? Well a bit of a mixed bag this one. Steve came out of the traps in fine fettle as ever but seemed to tail off a little towards the end. The whole session (as have most today) gave vastly more time to "Software and Services" than ever before. It has gone from a footnote at conference last year to being the main thrust of all the keynotes this year which tells me Redmond sees this as a HUGE bet going forward.

Having said that, there didn't seem to be a real coherent message overall and I almost felt like that dawned on Steve as he actually went through the presentation - almost as though that's what caused him to uncharacteristically calm down a little towards the end. A lot of new tools, technologies and platforms have sprung up in the last year and the demo's in this keynote were really something - exciting stuff. But I can't help but feel that the overall strategy at this point in time seems to be a little like the technology itself - a bit of a "mash-up". Let's not be too harsh though - the halibut for lunch was pretty good! - so my final thought is that MS is trying to make sense of this paradigm shift just like the rest of us mere mortals and they're putting some incredible technologies in place ready for when we all work the bigger picture out together.

 Mike Sievert started the Vista Optimised Desktop session with an update of Vista since it release 6 months ago.  There is strong awareness of the applications, with great customer adoption rates and excellent customer experience reported.  Many of the issues surrounding compatibility have been resolved, with most of the major critical enterprise applications running on Vista and almost 100% coverage on all known devices

Mike also talked about the partner opportunity around vista, stating that the opportunity is 22 times that of Microsoft’s on this product.  One of the areas of opportunity is for the partners providing services and in particular providing an optimised desktop for the enterprise. This can be provided through the Desktop Optimisation Pack, the aim of which is to resolve the issues in the enterprise such as administration control vs user flexibility, security, asset management, monitoring etc in the one application.

There was also a great demo on this showing how you can use on aspect of the DOP – softgrid – to deploy software applications to the desktop using AD with absolutely no desktop interaction.  Not only that, softgrid also associated the application with the user not the desktop and therefore the application moves with the user – pretty cool!

The partner opportunities for DOP:

There are also Windows Partner Solutions and Managed Optimised Desktop out there to help partners realise their opportunities in this area –which provide guidance, best practices and marketing tools.

 Tracey