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Microsoft Global Hosting Summit 2007Your Place for Real-Time Blogging, Video Clips, Photos, and News from the Event 03 April Microsoft hosting Summit 2008: April 8-10, 2008The 2008 Hosting Summit is just around the corner! Be sure to check out our new site for the latest news, photos, and real-time blogging from inside this year's show.
Enjoy!
21 March Analyst Session Recap from Chris SamsonAndrew Schroepfer, Tier1 Research: "An Analyst's View"
Andy from Tier 1 lent his usually trusted and practical impressions of the hosting space.
Overall, there was a great cross-section of requirements for success and advantages of a Microsoft partnership, how well does Google partner?
Interesting stance that Rackspace isn't Enterprise hosting and Microsoft is getting there. He provided great clarity that SaaS, web 2.0 and internet firms are the same thing Google has more compute power than MS according to Andy's matrix? I don't agree, but we do have the advantage in great hosting partners.
-Chris Samson
Chuck Ladd's Day 2 TakeawaySo I had to leave a little early today, but I was fortunate to be able to get around and talk to many of the partners that I interact with the most, and the feedback on the summit was extremely positive.
One session that I attended today was the Hosting 2.0: An Analyst’s view with Andy Schroepfer, where he did a year in review of hosting since the last hosting summit and gave insight to where hosting may be headed. With 60 slides in 1 hour, only some of the message resonates in my head, first one being for hoster’s to continue to offer hosted exchange. Go get those corporations and get them hosting their email platform. Second, was around SaaS, and how employees will want to get to their applications no matter if they are in the office or at home. Again, stressing that hoster’s should make partnerships with the ISV to create opportunity.
Andy also stressed the point to embrace your partnership with Microsoft!!
All in all, I had a great time at the summit and look forward to next year!
-Chuck Ladd Hoster Spotlight - OpSourceRichard Dym, SVP, marketing and business development
OpSource
Santa Clara, CA
Q: Who are your customers and what do you do for them?
We help ISVs take their applications to market via the SaaS distribution model. We provide the infrastructure, including both hardware and software, application management and 24/7 support for our customers’ customers. We allow our customers to focus on their customers instead of worrying about distribution.
Q: What’s your relationship with Microsoft?
We’ve had a strong relationship with Microsoft going back to our company’s founding in 2002. At that time we actually managed a Microsoft datacenter. Since we began to focus two years ago on the SaaS market and on enabling ISVs, our relationship has grown as Microsoft’s goals have followed a similar path.
We were involved in the beginning stages of the SPLA, which has really been the defining differentiator for our business. We’ve been able to charge our customers exactly the same as they charge their customers. Microsoft has also been heavily involved in our incubation program that provides a testing environment for ISVs evaluating the move to SaaS.
Q: What are the pain points for ISVs?
We’re seeing interest from two distinct sets of ISVs, those that have established packaged software businesses and startups. The pain points for each are quite different.
For the startup ISV whose business is built with an On Demand model in mind, they’re focus is on acquiring customers and establishing a business. They don’t want to have to worry about managing the infrastructure; they just want the customer to have a positive experience without any technical glitches.
For the established ISV with a well-defined and happy customer base the pain points are primarily centered on “how” to become an On Demand business. How do I re-architect my application? How do I test and conduct quality assurance? How do I restructure my organization, from software development all the way across the spectrum to finance?
Q: What progress are you seeing in the SaaS market?
We’ve grown from essentially scratch to 100 ISVs in two years with two-thirds of those being startup firms and the other third more established ISVs making their way into the SaaS market. We just recently announced a new solution called Optimal On Demand 2.0 that we’re very excited about. Through our Optimal Service Bus, we’re enabling ISVs to integrate a list of mission-critical but non-strategic application components provided by OpSource and its partners. The first of these components include business analytics and billing. Microsoft Hosting Summit, Some IIS 7 GoodiesMicrosoft's Hosting Summit is going on here in Bellevue, WA today and tomorrow. As you could expect, there is plenty of discussion around Exchange 2007, with data points showing that the market for Hosted Exchange is growing rapidly and that mobility is one of the key drivers behind this growth, CRM 4.0 ("Titan" is on its way and Microsoft is beginning to work with partners with to bring this up dated version with multi-tenant support to market), SaaS, and Software + Services. I'll discuss those last two in a different post later this week.
For the companies hosting IIS the best news that is coming out of this summit was shown off by Bill Staples during his demonstration of some of the new features that have been introduced in IIS 7. Hosting companies now have the ability to centralize the IIS configuration in one place and then point multiple nodes at the single configuration. This alleviates the need of the hosting company to build their own software to manage the replication of configuration information within an IIS cluster; commonly, if a hosting company wanted to offer a highly-available IIS hosting solution to their customers where there are multiple nodes in a cluster, they were left on their own with figuring out how to replicate creat, update, and delete operations to IIS, i.e. create site, delete site, etc. across the farm.
Another neat feature added to IIS 7 is the ability to publish a restricted view of the IIS 7 management console to the end-user across http(s), giving hosting companies the ability to offer a richer, Control Panel like add-on for sites hosted in IIS 7. The features available to the end-user can be customized by the hosting company.
Another exciting demo was of SoftGrid. Microsoft showed off the ability to simply enable an application for a user in a domain and then the user being able to click on the application and have it stream directly to the desktop. There's no indication on how this will fit in with the hosting community and if there will be a facility for hosters to host their own SoftGrid platform and sell on-demand applications like Office, but this platform looks promising and seems to be Microsoft's answer (though there was nothing official here, either, just a guess) to Google's push into online office applications. Ideally, Microsoft will seek to partner with hosting companies and allow us to build out this platform not only for Microsoft applications but also for ISVs who want to move into a hosted model without having to rewrite all of their code.
One concern I have, that I'm sure others will have, is what Microsoft's intention is with entering into the market with their own hosted Exchange and SharePoint offerings (as Ballmer alluded to a few weeeks ago) and how exactly partners who already offer those services will play into their hosting ecosystem. Right now, I believe it would be prudent for hosting companies to look at the products they're offering and then build a tier on top of these products that ties them together to create an added level of value greater than what the user gets out of the box. A good example of a company doing this is SMBLive who have taken SharePoint hosting to a new level for the SMB. I think we'll eventually see the decline of hosters who offer out of the box services and move towards building integrated services.
-Mathew Baldwin, theWHIR Blog |
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