The Desktop Giant Makes Its Move For The Enterprise Market.
Microsoft Corp. is one of the world's greatest marketing companies that just happens to be in the software business. Although Computer Associates International Inc. may raise products from the ashes, Microsoft uses matchstrikes to start forest fires. Licensing the technology to IBM Corp. for what later became the MS-DOS operating system is a classic example of such a matchstrike. MS-DOS subsequently became the world's most popular computer operating system, and Microsoft set off on its path to becoming the world's largest independent software company.
The landscape is never the same after Microsoft enters a market. Which is not to say that's a bad thing. Just as a forest fire rejuvenates the earth, so Microsoft's entry into a market usually pushes up the quality of the products that remain competitive and brings down the median price. That's great for consumers, but competing vendors are naturally a little less enthusiastic about the way that Microsoft then proceeds to manage the necessary reforestation according to its own architectural plans.
Harvard dropout William H. Gates III and his high school buddy Paul Allen, both from the Seattle area, founded Microsoft in 1975 to sell a version of the Basic programming language. They moved the business from Albuquerque, N.M. to Bellevue, Wash. in 1977 and onto the present Redmond, Wash. campus in 1986. Paul Allen left Microsoft in 1983 to wage a successful battle against Hodgkin's disease, later becoming active in software again through his own company, Asymmetrix Corp. (Bellevue, Wash.). Microsoft's revenues reached a billion dollars in 1990, and it is now a worldwide business with approximately 20,000 employees, operations in some 50 countries, and revenues of US$8.67 billion in fiscal 1996. Systems software still accounts for approximately one-third of the company's revenues, and applications software provides the other two-thirds.
Gates often stated that part of Microsoft's mission statement was to put a personal computer on every desktop - a mission that has been amended recently to include putting a server under every business desktop. This is not Mission Impossible. Nobody disputes that Microsoft has an iron grip on the corporate desktop through its MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 95, and Windows NT Workstation operating systems. But can Microsoft repeat its desktop dominance on the server?
Selling server-based operating systems and applications is a little different. Clearly the volume potential is lower by at least an order of magnitude, and upgrading the applications every year is not a scenario that every IS manager relishes. The operat ing systems and applications are more complex, sales cycles are longer, and the need for top-rank service and support is more critical. Instead of wowing bug-eyed users with cool features and T-shirts for "pull-through" selling, Microsoft must shift to n egotiating long-term software investments with high-level corporate honchos. It's comparable to the culture shock of switching from Main Street to Wall Street.
But just which level of "enterprise" information management is Microsoft trying to conquer? Remember that Microsoft does not sell enterprise applications. Enterprise applications are multiuser, transaction-processing applications such as accounting, supp ly chain management, manufacturing, human resources, payroll, and all of the specialized, vertical market variants of these horizontal applications. Microsoft focuses on supplying the enterprise "services" infrastructure, such as server operating systems , databases, messaging, development tools, systems management, and networking. Currently, Microsoft relies on third parties to supply the applications that actually run the enterprise. However, vendors in the transaction management applications space are speculating intensely as to how long Microsoft can ignore this multibillion-dollar market as it searches for future growth opportunities.
Today's "distributed" enterprise deploys information management at all four levels. The host may still play an important role in many transaction-intensive businesses such as airlines, banks, retail, and utilities, but the host is now one of several info rmation management solutions, not just the only one. Client/server is the embracing architecture that supports the distributed enterprise; network bandwidth, rather than the host processor, has become the main potential limiting factor. The focus now is not one-stop shopping but "best-of-breed," quality-driven information management solutions - regardless of the management complexity and reengineering cost that this approach may entail.
Microsoft currently has no real message for the level 4 transaction-intensive, mainframe-based enterprise. But a number of mainframes and other hosts are ripe for exploding into multiple servers; they were originally bought for the wrong reasons and are currently hosting applications put there simply because an expensive asset needed to be utilized. Just as a business acquisition often results in business units being spun off and managed more efficiently, so exploding the mainframe onto separate servers can result in far greater productivity from an information-access and utilization perspective for businesses in this situation.
Future releases of BackOffice are expected to add support for a common automation and scripting language (code-named "Denali"), a common console for installation and configuration, common event management and instrumentation services, and full support fo r SNMP and DCOM (distributed component object model).
Additional components for BackOffice now in the works will double the range of the suite. These components include: Microsoft Proxy Server for Internet/Intranet security, Microsoft Merchant Server for Internet/Intranet electronic commerce, and Transactio n Management (code-named "Viper") for managing distributed transactions.
A great deal is riding on the successful penetration of NT into the enterprise, simply because NT Server sales will drive the sales of the other BackOffice components. In any case, these components are so tightly integrated with NT that they can't run on any other OS without significant reengineering - so, if the flagship sinks, the fleet could go down with it. BackOffice simply repeats the successful Office strategy by making Microsoft's BackOffice components the best-of-breed on NT as the Office apps are positioned on Windows 3.x and 95.
In fact, BackOffice is beginning to look more like a plug-and-play version of IBM's OS/400 every day, and the AS/400 has proved to be a very successful business platform in enterprise environments. As with the AS/400, a big attraction of NT servers is th at they can run as a network, application, and database server - letting corporate IS departments standardize on a single-server architecture across all levels of the business unit. Also, as with OS/400, NT is not portable except within its own family o f single- and multiprocessor Intel and RISC processors. A mainframe version of NT would enable Microsoft to scale the heights of level 4 enterprise users and would almost certainly sound the death knell for Unix in the enterprise.
One problem, however, is that the limitations of NT become limitations for the components that ride on its back. NT does not have the directory services of Novell NetWare or Banyan Vines, it does not offer 64-bit flat memory addressing as some Unix syste ms do, and it does not offer a file system designed for the object world. All of these features, of course, are promised at some time in the future. Two of the biggest concerns about NT from an enterprise perspective today are scalability and availabilit y.
NT is behind in both single-server multiprocessor support and multiserver rollover or failover clustering support. Prior to NT 4.0, NT performance did not scale effectively past four CPUs on a single server. Microsoft claims that NT 4.0 now scales well t o eight CPUs and further. Of course, even this scalability still puts NT some distance behind Unix in the multiprocessor scalability stakes.
Although there are approximately a dozen third-party products for providing clustering and high availability to the NT environment, Microsoft's strategy for clustering is the "Wolfpack" initiative. Wolfpack initially aims to support shared device access mediation through use of a distributed lock manager (DLM) and "shared nothing" clustering in which application nodes share no system resources until failover. This functionality is the minimum required to support mission-critical transaction-processing s ervers.
The acquisition of FoxPro injected some database smarts into the company and scorched Borland's takeover of Ashton-Tate along the way. FoxPro continues to be upgraded, despite serving a shrinking Xbase community, but its position looks uncertain in Micro soft's product line. Access is the Office database, so its future is assured and it is firmly positioned as an end-user desktop database with a natural upsizing progression to the SQL Server RDBMS.
A large number of database-centric client/server applications, such as accounting and sales automation, are focusing on the NT/SQL Server platform for their application and database services. Practically every one of the top 50 accounting vendors offers or has announced an NT/SQL Server version of its product. NT 4.0 and the release of SQL Server 6.5 have together been the final push that will convert the nonbelievers, largely because of the improved feature set in SQL Server 6.5. (See Table 2.)
Apparently data warehousing is the next push for the SQL Server group - in particular, the setup and maintenance of metadata, data warehouse population, and administration. Despite the addition of the new Cube and Rollup functions in SQL Server 6.5, Micr osoft does not really have an OLAP story. There is no multidimensional engine on the server or the client and no OLAP or ROLAP tools on the desktop (unless you count pivot tables in Excel). Although SQL Server may be a good choice for a small data wareho use or data mart database server, it lacks the surrounding tools to populate and query the data that you would expect from a well-thought-out data warehousing strategy. Microsoft's vision in this area seems uncharacteristically blinkered -maybe it's just not a big enough market for the company to care about.
As Microsoft's realization of groupware, Exchange Server clearly has a lot of potential, particularly as part of a workflow management solution. But this status is still far off in the future. Currently Microsoft appears focused on winning as many client seats as it can from Lotus cc:Mail, Profs, and others. The messaging infrastructure is just another one of the enterprise layers that Microsoft wants to own because it has so much potential in the future world of message-driven, object-oriented, workflo w-managed client/ server applications.
Visual Basic was stratified into standard, professional, and enterprise releases back in version 4.0, and it continues to march in the footsteps of PowerBuilder and others as an enterprise application development tool. But the big news in the VB world is the renaissance of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), which somehow got lost in the rush to the Internet. Version 5.0 of VBA transforms a scripting language into a full application-development tool through support for the full VB syntax and ActiveX co ntrols. VBA is already included in Microsoft Excel and Access, and it is slated for inclusion in Word and PowerPoint in Office.
Microsoft has a less pure but possibly more pragmatic approach to objects as pieces of functionality that can be standalone or embedded in other objects. The prerequisite, of course, is that they expose their functionality through OLE, whether the object s are visual or non- visual when instantiated. Microsoft seems to view object orientation less in terms of technical characteristics and more as a means to offer a more flexible granularity in software design and assembly. Microsoft is working with SAP and others on Line of Business Objects (LOBjects); the delivery of applications as business objects will profoundly change the way they are designed, delivered, deployed, upgraded, and priced.
Microsoft was certainly caught off-guard by the growth of the Internet, but the company recognized a forest fire when it saw one and has taken rapid action to protect its desktop franchise. Few other $8 billion corporations could have acted so decisively , and if IBM had reacted in the same way to client/server in the early 1990s, then perhaps the whole industry would be different today. In roughly one year, Microsoft has:
Microsoft lacks an object repository for managing software objects and components, and it has no console offering to manage heterogeneous computing resources. Microsoft and Texas Instruments Software Division have been working on a repository product tha t combines the SQL Server RDBMS with Microsoft SourceSafe; this product is slated to be delivered first as a component of Visual Basic 5.0. The BackOffice System Management Server assists with systems, network, and applications management, but it is not intended to compete with products such as Hewlett-Packard's OpenView or CA's Unicenter.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Windows 95 GUI | Windows 95 user interface integrated into NT Server |
| Web Administration | Server administration can be managed through a Web browser |
| Network Monitor | Packet-level network traffic monitor and diagnostic tool |
| Server-Based Printing | Print drivers located on server for faster rendering of print jobs |
| Improved Diagnostics | New graphical tool for local or remote diagnostics of system resources |
| Improved Performance | Higher server throughput, faster version of Internet Information Server |
| New Internet Components | New version of Internet Information Server, Internet Explorer, and MS FrontPage |
| Multi Protocol Router | For LAN-LAN routing using IPX/SPX, TCP/IP, and AppleTalk |
| Telephony API 2.0 | TAPI support for building integrated computer telephony applications |
| DCOM Support | Support for the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) |
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Distributed Transactions | Adds two-phase commit for transaction integrity across servers |
| Web Assistant | For automating the publishing of SQL Server data across the Internet |
| ODBC Replication | Replication to non-SQL Server subscriber databases via ODBC |
| OLAP Functions | Cube and Rollup for server-based query optimization |
| Enhanced SQL | SQL Server 6.5 is now certified as ANSI SQL-92 compliant |