Microsoft plans to release updated versions of Windows Server, SQL Server and Visual Studio at the same time early next year.
Microsoft's chief operating officer, Kevin Turner, said during a keynote speech at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference 2007 in Denver that Windows Server 2008 -- formerly code-named Longhorn Server -- will be launched worldwide on February 27 along with SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008.
The main launch event will be held in Los Angeles, according to Turner, who called the trio of products the big dogs of Microsoft's enterprise software portfolio. He told a packed hall of Microsoft business partners at the Denver Convention Center that the group rollout would produce a feeding frenzy of opportunity, creating hundreds of billions of dollars in the (Windows) ecosystem.
The early 2008 launch plan may seem somewhat of a long way off for customers who were expecting Windows Server 2008 to be available before the end of this year -- the shipment plan that Microsoft had previously disclosed. Company officials said that the late 2007 release schedule wasn't being changed, although the formal product launch won't occur until next year.
At the partner conference, which is expected to attract more than 10,000 resellers, systems integrators and developers, Microsoft also launched a hosted version of its Dynamics CRM software for customer relationship management applications.
In addition, Turner said that Microsoft was making fundamental improvements to its partner program in an effort to help its 600,000 business partners worldwide make more money, even as it moved "full steam ahead" toward a software-as-a-service strategy via offerings such as the new Live CRM product.
For instance, in September, Microsoft would roll out an online dashboard that let partners measure themselves against similar companies on sales, profitability and other performance indicators, Turner said.
Microsoft's field sales representatives, who support partners, are now being compensated based on new metrics that emphasise partner satisfaction just behind overall customer satisfaction. In addition to those metrics, the software vendor during its current fiscal year is emphasising, in decreasing order of importance, Windows Server license growth, sales of enterprise search software and the addition of voice over IP capabilities by users via Office Communication Server.
Turner also promised that Microsoft would continue to increase its $US7 billion annual investment on software research and development, and that it
would make available a clear software road map. And he vowed that the software vendor wouldn't turn away from its partner-oriented business model. "We are committed to winning with partners," Turner said. "That's the way the company was built, and that is the way the company will continue to run." But, he said, partners did need to be willing to adapt, especially to the software-as-a-service model, in order to remain well-fed by Microsoft users. "Look, this is gonna happen," he said. "Customers are going to want choice. We all have to build that door and then walk through it."
As an example, Turner touted Microsoft's Office Live offerings, which he said were being used by more than 400,000 small businesses, as a growing opportunity for partners. "I fully believe that in two to three years, Office Live will be one of the top three or four deployed products by Microsoft," Turner said.
He credited business partners for helping Microsoft's Exchange email server to attract more than 2.5 million email users that were formerly on IBM's Lotus Notes software. Over the past two years, Microsoft has released a series of tools for migrating from Lotus applications to Exchange.
Turner said the company's goal this year was to get 4 million Notes seats.
On complaints that Windows Vista was proving unattractive to end-users because of device incompatibilities, Turner said that there were now more than 10,000 devices that had been certified as either Vista-ready or Vista-capable.
Alluding to recent hardware problems with Microsoft's Xbox 360 game consoles that will result in a $1 billion-plus charge against earnings, as well as to slower-than-expected sales of Windows Live and Office Live, Turner said while the company had worked hard to grow market share in the last couple of years, it was now working hard on profitability.