Guild Companies

Microsoft held its annual Microsoft Exchange Conference in Anaheim, California last week just as we were going to press, and the company was trying to make the best of the fact that it does not yet have its core Windows .NET Server 2003 operating system out the door. Nonetheless, Microsoft's top brass did have some interesting things to say about its future middleware as it relates to its Exchange messaging, groupware, and workflow.

Microsoft knows that to compete against IBM's Notes/Domino, it needs to offer a more integrated solution than it has to date, and Microsoft knows this because Cliff Reeves, who used to be head of marketing at Lotus, is now the vice president of marketing for Microsoft's .NET Server line. Microsoft's future "Jupiter" and "Greenwich" products are all about giving Microsoft the same caliber of collaboration and workflow capabilities that IBM has been building into its Domino-SameTime-QuickPlace stack for the past several years.

At some point, an application vendor that has delivered a set of inter-related products to the market in a piecemeal fashion comes to the conclusion that it is better to integrate these products and offer them as a bundled suite at a discounted price compared to the unbundled versions of the programs. Microsoft took this approach to the market with deadly consequences for its competitors with its Office desktop and Back Office server application suites, and with the future "Jupiter" e-business suite, Microsoft wants to do the same thing. While companies have been looking at Microsoft's BizTalk Server, Content Management Server, and Commerce Server programs against competitive alternatives, there has not been a single Microsoft solution stack that customers can just buy and drop on their servers to do e-business. IBM, at least from a marketing standpoint, can say that customers merely need to buy WebSphere--which is not really a single product, but actually dozens of middleware products--to do e-business. Microsoft wants to be able to say the same thing with its future Jupiter program, which will integrate and bundle the most recent releases of BizTalk Server, Content Management Server, and Commerce Server into a single product. Microsoft announced Content Management Server 2002 last week.

Microsoft said last week is that Jupiter will be delivered to the market in two phases. The first phase of technologies, due in the second half of 2003, will deliver process automation, workflow, support for BPEL4WS (an XML variant designed for automating business processes), and tighter integration with the Visual Studio.NET development tool and Windows .NET Server 2003 operating system. In the first half of 2004, Jupiter will include content management, commerce services, catalog management, campaign management, site management (including analytics), and customer targeting and personalization features.

What this Jupiter announcement suggests is that the way Microsoft has been designing e-business and Web services middleware--with point solutions that it has to sell against other point solution providers as well as suite sellers like IBM--is not working for all customers, and probably not for many customers. The biggest gripe all companies have is that it is too hard to do e-business, it is too hard to integrate all of this software, and that the companies who make e-business software and their integration partners have no motivation to change this because they get very rich integrating all of these disparate components, even when they come from one vendor like IBM or Microsoft. If Microsoft fulfills the promise it seems to be making with Jupiter--that customers can buy just this stack of software and they can do e-business, even with legacy backends--then IBM, BEA Systems, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle are going to get a run for the e-business money.

Microsoft says that licensing terms and pricing have not been determined yet for Jupiter, and it seems likely that Microsoft has not yet decided on a name for the product, either. The company has hinted that it understands that customers want an integrated e-business stack, but they also want the ability to buy and use the components they need. They don't want to pay for the whole stack if they only use a few pieces, and it is possible that Microsoft's licensing for Jupiter reflects this.

Microsoft was also talking about its future messaging middleware, known under its code name Greenwich, at MEC 2002 last week. Greenwich, which competes against SameTime and QuickPlace from IBM as an industrial-strength instant messaging and group online meeting program for business and not a toy like AOL TimeWarner's Instant Message or Microsoft's Windows Messaging, was supposed to be a part of the Windows .NET Server 2003 operating system. But that is not going to happen. Greenwich, which could ship a few months after the "Whistler" edition of Windows gets into the channel in early 2003, is expected to deliver instant messaging and video conferencing and to include authentication, encryption, and other features such as auditing and logging that enterprises feel uncomfortable without. Exactly how Microsoft will sell Greenwich is unclear, but it will probably come out as a standalone product and then either be merged into Exchange and/or Jupiter.

Microsoft also gave some details on the future "Titanium" release of its Exchange Server email messaging program. Titanium will feature eight-node clustering both for scalability on Exchange workloads and for failover for companies who want to mirror their Exchange server. Titanium will also be better integrated into the Microsoft Operations Manager to make it easier to manage. Microsoft says that compression and shadow copy technologies that are being built into Windows .NET Server 2003 will allow companies that install the Titanium release of Exchange, which knows how to use these features, will be able to reduce the number of Exchange servers they have to support by as much as a factor of five. Titanium will also have a set of APIs that Microsoft collectively calls XSO that will allow third party application developers to use XML hooks to integrate their applications with Exchange to create the holy grail of Web services applications.