Software Plus Services - An Interesting Development

Last month, I blogged about next generation internet application and how companies like Amazon are innovating on the business model side and scaling their infrastructure out to provide rock bottom prices. At the Enterprise 2.0 conference, Rishi Chandra from Google touched on a similar topic. Early July, Microsoft announced it Microsoft Online Services that can:

Help relieve the burden of managing and maintaining business systems, freeing IT departments to focus on initiatives that can help deliver true competitive advantage.

Microsoft Online Services include:

• Office Live Meeting
• Exchange Hosted Services
• Dynamics CRM Online
• SharePoint Online

The most interesting part of the announcement is the pricing. Microsoft introduces a new licensing model call a User Subscription License (USL). USLs are interesting because they blend online access and on-premise access. So if a company has bought a USL of Office Live Meeting, their users are licensed to use either Microsoft Online or an on-premise deployment of Live Meeting. This provides an interesting twist to the Software Plus Services that Microsoft has been touting for a little while now.

Licensing is very competitive as well. A USL for the Business Productivity Online Suite is $15 per month. That means, for $15 per month, a user can have access to Exchange, SharePoint server, Live Meeting and, when released, Office Communications Online. See the Office SharePoint write up for a good explanation of the licensing model. Customers can also license Microsoft Online piece meal:

• $10/month for an Exchange USL,
• $7.25/month for SharePoint,
• $2.50/month for Office Communications
• $4.50/month for Live Meeting

Each USL includes a storage allocation: 1GB per USL for Exchange storage and 250MB per USL for SharePoint, and additional storage can be purchased for $2.50 per GB per month.

Looking back at how Cloud Computing is shaping to be a disruptive trend, this announcement is particularly interesting. The business model part makes it particularly attractive to IT organizations as they can start testing out mixed deployment of hosted and on-premise while protecting their investment. It will be interesting to follow how this gets adopted, but in my opinion, this is indicative of a paradigm shift in our industry.

On a closing note, an interesting description of the infrastructure required to support this offering and telling on the level of investment:

• 13 global datacenters (growing to 20 next year)
• Replicated to two distinct datacenters to provide redundancy
• Service guarantees a 99.9 percent SLA

Meridio Records Management with SharePoint

I came across this interesting presentation from Meridio a couple days ago. Meridio positions itself as the leading worldwide provider of enterprise Document and Records Management (eDRM) software, engineered for Microsoft .NET platforms.

As a result, Meridio is naturally embracing SharePoint and identifying both how to position itself and provide value-added to SharePoint 2007. Meridio recognizes one of the weaknesses of the SharePoint architecture with the risk of proliferation of a large number of sites which in return makes the SharePoint infrastructure difficult to manage (if not unmanageable) for large organizations. SharePoint's approach to Records Management relies heavily on the site archictecture as well. See the Web Seminar with AIIM and Microsoft: Records Management in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for a good overview.

Meridio is positioning itself as an enterprise policy management solution for SharePoint 2007 which can act as an enterprise records management repository for SharePoint and legacy systems as well.



Here is a screenshot of Meridio’s policy management user interface in a SharePoint environment.


Meridio's architecture seems to start positioning Meridio as a potential virtual records management repository for the enterprise which is undoubtedly the right direction for them to remain relevant.


It is an interesting and promising extension to SharePoint. Remains to be seen how successful they will be now that SharePoint is positioning itself as a platform that can provide basic Records Management capabilities.

Managing the Software Development Process: Microsoft is Getting it Right.

I recently attended a presentation on the upcoming Microsoft Visual Studio Team Suite (MVSTS) and I must say: what Microsoft is coming up with looks very much like an aggregation of the best practices that everyone preaches, all bundled into one very cohesive package. I decided to run a comparison between the tools available as Open Source and how an Open Source stack would compare to MVSTS.

First the Microsoft stack: I found two good resources for describing MVSTS roadmap and getting an overview of MVSTS.


Second the Open Source stack: I decided to focus on the Eclipse set of tools (see references below) and Apache Maven for software project management.


After integrating all the tools out there, the Open Source stack comes fairly close functionally to the MVSTS stack. Unfortunately, integrating all those technologies into one cohesive package requires a good amount of work. I personally feel that this is unfortunate. In my mind it raises some fundamental questions:

• What purpose are open source foundations fulfilling when developing their product offerings? Is it technology adoption, industry cooperation, technology innovation? Providing a cohesive offering requires making some choices that are difficult in foundations with members with sometimes competing interests. Here Microsoft has a clear advantage. So how can the open source community provide a cohesive tool kit for managing the software development process? Is it a desirable outcome?
• Can commercial entities leverage a common offering and maintain a coherent strategy and competitive advantage? A lot of the value in commercial offerings comes from the integration of diverse technologies into a cohesive offer. If open source foundations fulfill this role, can commercial entities' offerings still remain attractive? Does this cannibalize product offerings in favor of services?

The answer to most of those questions depends on the type of technology. With regards to tools supporting the software development process; I feel it makes sense to foster collaboration. Providing a more integrated open source offering would serve as a foundation to the open source development ecosystem. The Eclipse foundation has done a wonderful job at doing so, but in a fragmented fashion. This is what Microsoft achieves by investing in its development tool suite. It fosters the adoption of its technology and platform and nurtures its technological ecosystem. I feel that all commercial vendors could benefit with what amounts to a fairly minimal investment. Most of the technology building blocks are already available.

Eclipse References:
- Eclipse UML2 tools
- Test and performance tools
- Testing tools
- Monitoring tools
- Web tools
- SDO tools.