News

posted on 03 March 2008 09:54

Microsoft has announced it is expanding its Microsoft Online Services (MOS) offer to businesses of all sizes in the second half of this year. Early customers include Autodesk, Blockbuster, Coca-Cola Enterprises, Energizer Holdings and Ingersoll-Rand.

Microsoft's statement said: "the new services enable businesses to access e-mail, calendaring, contacts, shared workspaces, and webconferencing and videoconferencing over the Web. The new services are managed through a single Web-based interface, designed to meet the needs of IT professionals. Through this security-enhanced interface, IT professionals can monitor the performance of the services, add and configure users, submit and track support requests, and manage users and licenses."

Naturally Microsoft's partners can take part in this. Early partners include Atos Origin, BT, Ceryx, Evolve Partners, Getronics, HCL Technologies and Unisys.

Matt Cain, research vice president at Gartner, offered this comment: "We believe the SaaS (Sofware as a Service) model will dramatically change the way businesses provision, operate and consume IT services during the next five years. Microsoft's SaaS investment is both an offensive move to capture operational revenue (in addition to the license fees it now collects), and a defensive measure to combat potential incursions from suppliers such as Google."

"The challenges Microsoft faces are considerable. While it runs one of the largest public portal sites in the industry, providing large-scale SaaS services for business requires significant expertise in high availability, security, multi-tenant architectures, network topologies and problem resolution. Furthermore, Microsoft is retrofitting its existing software to the multi-tenant server model. It won't be until the next version of Exchange (due in 2011) that its core products are better architected to run in a multi-tenant SaaS model."

"Nonetheless, Microsoft's substantial market share in the e-mail and team-ware market, particularly among SMBs, and the growing acceptance of SaaS business models create a significant opportunity for Microsoft. We believe that 20 per cent of enterprise e-mail seats will use a SaaS provisioning model by 2012, compared with 1 per cent in 2007."

The key is the software, server and storage infrastructure behind it. The company has not released any details of the storage infrastructure.

Microsoft's recent HotMail outage suggests that infrastructure problems do occur. It may be the case that millions of MOS users being added to the Windows Live infrastructure may strain it further and further outages cannot be ruled out.