Microsoft forms alliance to spread BPM to mid-market
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10 vendors of BPM tools have joined the Microsoft Business Process Alliance and agreed to add support for Microsoft's Biztalk server to their products.
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Rest of world discovered The acceptance of new abstract concepts can sometimes be harmful to entrenched philosophical (and marketing) positions. Microsoft's announcement this week that it is to bolster the business process management (BPM) software market is an admission that there are parts of the world which are not wholly Microsoft.â¦
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MicrosoftÂ by mid-2006 plans to release a new version of its BizTalk Server business integration software, offering support for SQL Server 2005 and simplified management, among other features.
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Microsoft invites business users to preview its integrated performance management applications.
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Microsoft Corp. will participate in a meeting later this month with vendors and organizations that are backing several different identity management systems, an indication that cooperation between the software giant and its peers is improving.
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AMD, Dell, Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems have joined forces on Web Services Management, a new specification that promises to simplify systems management.
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Microsoft, IBM and Borland are upgrading their software and offering users new workflow features, support for multiple languages and tools to manage the lifecycle of in-house applications.
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Microsoft is offering updates Wednesday on the progress of interoperability initiatives, including the Interoperability Executive Customer Council (IEC) and the Interop Vendor Alliance (IVA).The company's announcement is "a way of taking stock after a year of fairly intensive activity," said Tom Robertson, Microsoft general manager for interoperability and standards.Formed last year, the IEC features 41 members from governments and corporations who work with Microsoft executives and product teams. IEC is meeting in Redmond, Wash. this week.According to Microsoft, IEC has addressed more than 60 issues in its four defined work streams, which include:* Office productivity and collaboration tools to ensure that tools can exchange documents and enable collaboration and document management across systems * Developer tools and run time, in which application development has been boosted across platforms and systems * Security and identity management with the promoting of security across many identity platforms * Systems management through enabling end-to-end, cross-platform service managementHighlights in security and ID management include Microsoft collaboration with industry partners Fraunhofer-Institute FOKUS, ThoughtWorks, and Zend Technologies to develop open-source interoperability projects on information cards for Sun's Java language, Ruby, PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), and C-module. These initiatives will give users better control over personal information on the Web, Microsoft said."We're ultimately trying to provide people with better control over their personal information on the Web and improve the trustworthiness of Web-based interaction," Robertson said.In the system management area, Microsoft acquired enterprise management company Engyro to incorporate monitoring products into Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager 2007.The IVA, launched in November 2006, discusses mutual customer feedback and focuses on technical collaboration to resolve interoperability challenges through scenario-based testing, Microsoft said. Companies like Linspire, Sun, and AMD participate.At the Interop New York 2007 conference this week, an IVA pavilion will showcase collaborations, such as EMC, CA, and Microsoft streamlining management of heterogeneous systems, including Linux, Oracle, JBoss, and Windows. This is being done via a Systems Management Interoperability Lab.Also, IVA members Centrify, Quest Software, and Microsoft worked to demonstrate how to centrally manage security identities across Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows. Cross-product federation is being demonstrated as well by several members as part of a federated identity initiative.To advance portal document repository collaboration, IVA members Merido, Microsoft, and others have shown how to identify and collaborate on documents across portals and repositories.Also, Microsoft began working to deliver interoperability by design based on commitment to XML in 2005. Since then, the company has announced more than 30 interoperability deliverables including moving dozens of specifications to the OSP (Open Specification Promise), interoperability projects like Linux and Windows virtualization and management work being done by Microsoft and Novell, Microsoft said.Microsoft is announcing on Wednesday that OSP is being extended to hypercall API in Windows Server Virtualization. This applies virtualization to further enable interoperability across commercial and open-source software solutions, Microsoft said.Microsoft's interoperability efforts have not been without criticism. A deal with Novell on interoperability between Suse Linux and Windows, featuring payments going between the two companies, has drawn criticism in the open-source community as a concession to Microsoft.Robertson said Microsoft has made a lot of progress with interoperability, detailing with issues that are not universally easy to address. But he acknowledged not every single issue will be solved.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft partners introduced to the company's software-plus-services strategy this week at its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) applauded the plan, though they noted a few challenges as the company makes the transition from selling business software to offering more hosted and Web-based services. Microsoft used its annual partner conference, held this year in Denver, as a coming-out party for the strategy, with CEO Steve Ballmer outlining the plan for the first time after other executives have been discussing it publicly for more than a year. It seemed fitting that the company's top executive was the one to deliver the message to thousands of partners who play a significant role in the company's success. "I had no idea how partner-focused Microsoft really is," said Linda Gillis, a first-time attendee of the WPC and director of marketing for Squirrel Systems, a British Columbia company that provides restaurant point-of-sale software and services. This dependency on partners is a double-edged sword for Microsoft as it moves to a more Web-centric services business model versus the software license model it has used successfully for years. The company not only has to revise its strategy, remaining several steps behind competitors such as Google that started business on the Web and have no traditional software business, but it also has to help its partners make changes, too. To do this, Microsoft has been slowly ramping up its hosted services portfolio with a series of both consumer and business services. Executives also said at the WPC that those services will eventually become a full-fledged development platform, being both an OS and platform for new applications on the Web in a similar way that Windows is on the desktop. Gillis said that moving toward offering more services for business in addition to software is the right direction for both Microsoft and its partners. "The addition of services helps to create long-term customer relationships and a recurring revenue stream," she said. Most partners agreed with this sentiment, but some noted challenges that both Microsoft and partners will face as they make the switch. Jay Blazensky, vice president of business development for RingCentral, a Microsoft partner that provides voice services, including click-to-call, agreed that creating repeatable revenue is a definite benefit of the plan. But he noted that a challenge for Microsoft and its partners is to convince sales people to "forgo the larger up-front commission in lieu of a recurring annuity." "Those that buy into the model and are successful -- and patient -- have the opportunity to be enormously successful," he said. Another partner, Joe McDermott of Solution Canvas, said Microsoft's strategy of transitioning services in a calculated and deliberateÂ manner is the only way to make the change, which is necessary because it is what customers are demanding. Solution Canvas has built a service for small law firms using Microsoft's Office Live hosted service. "I think the strategy is the way forward strategically for both Microsoft and [partners] ... because in the end the marketplace will dictate and demand," he said. "End-users are who ultimately matter, and now that we have new Web technologies like AJAX and a rapid application development platform in Office Live, the barriers to powerful online applications are gone." At the same time, McDermott acknowledged that some Microsoft partners will have to learn new skills to take advantage of the new services approach, though the company's "considered pace" for moving to services will help them in that endeavor. While McDermott praised the technologies that enable more hosted services, one of them -- reliable access to broadband -- remains a hindrance not only to Microsoft's services plan but also its competitors' plans, RingCentral's Blazensky said. "It's an industry-wide challenge ... [but] it's maturing every day," he noted.
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On Tuesday in Denver, Microsoft told its Worldwide Partners that the on-demand version of its customer relationship management (CRM) software will be released to early adopters later this summer, and will be available for a full market rollout in the first half of 2008.
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Frankfurt, October 18: Microsoft launched a new software product aimed at small and mid-sized enterprises on Monday to strengthen its position in a fragmented market it sees as ripe for growth.
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Microsoft plans on Tuesday to unveil what could be an industry-changing effort in application modeling and SOA with its "Oslo" project, which could significantly change the equation in the Windows application deployment space.Part of Oslo involves delivering a unified platform integrating services and modeling, Microsoft said. But instead of models describing the application, models are the applications themselves.Oslo is a codename for a set of technical investments that will be delivered in the next major versions of Microsoft's platform products, said Steven Martin, director of product management in the company's Connected Systems division. These products include Visual Studio, System Center, BizTalk Server, BizTalk Services, and the .Net Framework. Beta releases of Oslo technology are due in 2008."Oslo is a set of technologies that we think will help take model-driven design mainstream," Martin said.With Oslo, Microsoft is making investments aligned with a vision to simplify the effort needed to build, deploy, and manage composite applications within and across organizations. The effort builds on model-driven and service-enabled principles and extends SOA beyond the firewall.Release dates of Oslo-driven products have not been set. "This will make existing products we have better. Oslo doesn't have any new products. It's being injected into existing projects," Martin said.The products include:* Microsoft .Net Framework "4," which will further enable model-driven development within the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Web services platform and Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF).* Visual Studio "10," to follow the upcoming Visual 2008 package. Version 10 focuses on application lifecycle management with tools for model-driven design of distributed applications.* BizTalk Server "6," which will continue to offer technology for distributed SOA and BPM and include capabilities for composite applications.* BizTalk Services "1," which provides BizTalk capabilities within the cloud, will feature Web-based services for hosting composite applications that cross organizational boundaries. Advanced messaging, identity, and workflow will be featured.* Metadata repositories will be aligned across server and tools products, including System Center "5," Visual Studio "10," and BizTalk Server "6." Each will utilize repository technology for managing, versioning, and deployment models."System Center will be able to grab an application from the repository and deploy it easily without any intermediate steps," said Martin. Also, Microsoft anticipates that WCF and WWF will collapse into a single technology, he said.Analysts at Gartner called Oslo "ambitious.""It's pretty ambitious, and as a matter of fact, I believe we're not going to see anything concrete until well into 2008 and possibly 2009," said analyst Massimo Pezzini, vice president of the application platform strategies group at Gartner.Featured in Oslo are three fundamental components: a modeling environment, a business process server, including a significant evolution of BizTalk Server, and a new deployment model, Pezzini said.Oslo makes sense on paper, he said. "So far, there are only ideas and plans and prototypes, etc., so we have to see," said Pezzini.He added that he senses Oslo is mostly focused on enabling Microsoft Dynamics applications as work as enterprise applications via a SaaS (software as a service) model.Microsoft will need industry backing for Oslo to succeed, said analyst Nick Gall, vice president at Gartner."It's doubtful that it could really have the kind of major impact that I'm sure Microsoft and all of us would like to see unless they get the industry behind the approach," Gall said. Microsoft said it is evaluating whether to submit Oslo to an industry standards body and whether to seek industry-wide use of Oslo.SOA is related to Oslo because a services piece is offered, in which tooling and integration are improved with the .Net Framework. Also, there will be better connectivity to BizTalk Services, which provides Web-based services for messaging, identity, and workflow.Modeling, meanwhile, is important to application development, said Martin. Microsoft sees stumbling blocks with modeling as it is now: that modeling represents the application or business logic at a specific time, thus providing only a snapshot, and that models exist in isolation."Anytime you're looking at a model, you're only looking at a piece of the application because each of those models is separate," Martin said.Solving these problems involves taking modeling mainstream, he said. "Today, modeling is really only something that a select group of users and a select group of companies can do," said Martin.Whether a user is designing, developing, or deploying applications, Oslo "will simplify your job," Martin stressed.Microsoft's approach is not about Unified Modeling Language (UML), a technology of which Microsoft has not been a big supporter. But UML is a great example of a modeling language and Microsoft wants to unify its approach to modeling in general, Martin said.A modeling language is part of Oslo, but Microsoft is building a modeling language, a set of tools, and a unified repository. Microsoft's modeling language provides a way to unify existing modeling languages, similar to Microsoft's Common Language Runtime for application development.Oslo expands beyond UML to cover deployment and management, which UML does not address, Pezzini said.Key to Microsoft's effort is a unified metadata repository. Users get a view of a model being pulled out of this repository, Martin said. Deployment and policy information, workflow, and rules are maintained in one location, to prevent loss of data useful when deploying and managing an application or writing business rules against it."We think this will allow a much broader set of users to collaborate on applications," Martin said. "We think the process of building applications will be more efficient when anybody can see the application holistically."If Microsoft is successful with its plan to have application components automatically deployed based on models in the repository, it will be "a very huge benefit for the IT operations," said Pezzini.Microsoft is making available tools and guidance to take advantage of "real-world SOA." Featured are SOA resources from Microsoft and industry partners. Meanwhile, the new Microsoft SOA and Business Process Solution Center offers resources such as patterns and practices based on customer implementations.Microsoft's approach to SOA is to start out with a business problem and build services. The company will continue to work with partners such as AmberPoint and SOA Software to help round out SOA offerings, said Martin.Also at the conference, Microsoft plans to demonstrate an upcoming technology preview of BizTalk Services, with additional support for interoperability, Web 2.0 services, identity standards, and workflow in the cloud.The Oslo vision will be the subject of a keynote by Robert Wahbe, corporate vice president of the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft, at the Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference in Redmond, Wash., on Tuesday morning. Microsoft's SOA strategy will be covered in the presentation.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft partners introduced to the company&#39;s software-plus-services strategy this week at its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) applauded the plan, though they noted a few challenges as the company makes the transition from selling business software to offering more hosted and Web-based services.
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Microsoft announced a major support upgrade, clearer road maps, and a new financing option for its Dynamics range of business applications on Wednesday.
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Microsoft Chief Software Architect Bill Gates said the key for simplifying system management lies in the company's Dynamic Systems Initiative, which he described as a long-term vision that needs broad industry cooperation.
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Microsoft on Wednesday reached another milestone in its multiyear Dynamic Systems Initiative when it released to manufacturing the latest version of its Microsoft Operations Manager.
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Release makes use of technology from CodeWeavers to let customers run applications from Microsoft.