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April 03 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!
March 21 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 Hoster Spotlight - MultrixAlexander Nederkoorn, marketing manager
Multrix
Amsterdam
Q: What challenges does your business face as you continue to grow?
We started business in 2000 at the peak and then denouement of the ASP hype cycle. We faced an obvious difficult business environment at that point in time but were able to wait out the rough times while still positioning ourselves for future growth. We broke into the black two years ago and have continued to grow since. Our biggest challenge now is to continue the strong growth by keeping current on new technological innovations that will help keep operating costs low while providing increased value to our customers, SMBs in the 50 to 1,000 employee range.
Q: What’s your relationship with Microsoft?
While we have a relatively small percentage of customers that prefer Linux, we primarily host Microsoft applications. We’ve grown along with Microsoft over the past seven years moving from Office and Exchange to now adding Dynamics solutions, including CRM. The SPLA was a particularly strong incentive for our business, particularly early on as it provided us the ability to keep our expenditures in line with our revenues.
Q: How can Microsoft help and what you would you like to see next?
We’d like to see Microsoft more aggressively market directly to end-user organizations on behalf of the hosting industry. They currently help enable individual hosting company with marketing support but the entire industry would benefit from Microsoft taking an increasingly visible role to end-users. More Day 1 Thoughts from Chris SamsonMorris Miller: "Thriving in the Changing Hosting Industry"
Great, captive audience. Dynamic speaker, industry credible source. Most captive speaker of the day!
Great, fair and critical analysis of office live offerings, specifically how SMB's could use it.
Best large session of the day, fantastic and well organized!
Virtualization: Industry Panel: Dan Golding, Tier1 Research (Moderator)
(I was one of the panelists)
Good question by Dan Golding around how each organization (MS, Rackforce and SWSoft) deliver a solution for a different aspect of the virtualization market
SWSoft was a little too focused on talking about their product (sales pitch) and less focused on answering the questions raised
Moderator was asking excellent, industry relevant and informed questions.
Very impressed with Rackforce and the balance they have found with standard OS virtualization, H/W virtualization and Control panel functionality with SW Soft solution
Audience seemed informed and up to date on benefits of SCVMM and Windows Virtualization.
Definitely need more clarity for our hosting customers/partners on MS’s virtualization licensing March 20 Chuck Ladd's Day 1 TakeawaysLive from the 3rd annual Microsoft Hosting Summit here is Bellevue, WA where 500 people have descended to hear and understand Microsoft's commitment to the hosting space and its partners. Last night was a great reception where hosters of all sorts interacted and intermingled with one another. It appeared to be a great event!
Day one of the official event and much news has been relayed to the partners, including the release of Windows-based hosting 4.5 and the announcement that HMC 4.0 will be released to the web on April 16th.
One session that sticks out most for me is the "Driving Growth via Software + Services" with Andy Lees. Andy did a phenomenal job delivering a message on the evolution of hosting, and the pending collision of the 15 billion dollar hosting market with the 1.5 Trillion dollar IT market. Clearly IT departments will realize the benefit of outsourcing LOB applications to hosting companies in the near future. Recognizing the business opportunity for hosters Andy reinforced Microsoft’s commitment to SaaS and SOA by describing how to use our products as a platform for delivery. It was good to see demo's on Windows SharePoint Services and SoftGrid, and how to use those tools to deliver applications.
Morris Miller delivered a compelling message around partnering with Microsoft and shared his experiences of the partnership when he was with RackSpace. He did an excellent job delivering his perspective on the services that are being offered by the giants (MS, Google, Yahoo) and how they really are competing with one another, and not the current hosters.
As I was walking back to my hotel I solicited a little feedback on the breakout sessions and was told the mobility break out was incredible and that the technology is awesome!
-Chuck LaddWelcome Reception - Microsoft’s Global Hosting Summit Kicks OffLast night, 325 hosting executives from around the world and a further 125 Microsoft employees converged on the Bellevue Westin for a cocktail reception, noting the start of the 3rd annual Microsoft Hosting Summit. As always, deep conversation over funky cocktails took place all around the room.
2007 is an important year for hosters as they face many industry-changing challenges. Topics sure to be discussed and debated at this year’s event include the “entry of the giants” (such as Google, eBay, Amazon, Office Live), the explosion in the SaaS market, and consumers moving to social networks. Our partners are here to understand how we continue to work together to win in this market.
It is sure to be another lively event!
-Michael van Dijken Deven Kampenhout: Microsoft Hosting Summit, Day 1This week I'm at the Global Hosting Summit in Redmond, WA, USA. It is an invitation-only event where hosting and SaaS ISV partners come to network and exchange ideas, as well as participate in keynote and breakout sessions about the hosting industry and updates from some of the heads of Microsoft in this space. There are also some great talks by industry influential’s and analysts.
The best thing about the event in my opinion is the ability to network and have conversations with the C-level execs from some of the most important and successful companies in the industry. There are so many influential's in one place, and it's great to rub shoulders with everyone once a year. This is my third year attending the hosting summit, and it has grown every year!
I really liked listening to Scott Guthrie, who is the GM for the .Net Developer division inside Microsoft. Basically, most of the key people related to hosting on the product side report up through him in some form or another. He brought up Bill Staples who gave a very succinct demo of IIS7. He specifically called out the new UI, the delegated/remote administration capabilities, and impressed everyone with a demo of remotely stored configuration file to easily enable a web-farm scenario. I love Bill's demos. Bill and Scott also talked about the upcoming Longhorn Beta 3, which also has a go-live license program available. Hosters, this is a great way to get your staff and your customers ready for the best server product Microsoft has ever produced!
Morris Miller, from Rackspace and Sequel Ventures, LLC. gave a rather interesting presentation discussing brand positioning. He called out the branding success and lessons learned from Rackspace, compared to the lack of positioning from former hosting giant Interland. He also dispelled some of the myths surrounding some of the "big" players like Google and Microsoft (i.e. Office Live) who are in the hosting game. Basically, the idea is that neither Google nor Microsoft has the agility nor service levels that lend to truly competitive hosting offerings, especially in regards to offering services to fortune 500 companies.
Over lunch, I had a very interesting conversation with a group of people from Data Return and Internap. John Keller, from Internap, rose some very valid concerns regarding the competitive threat presented by Google, with products such as Google's office and hosted email offerings. In this regard, I have several different points of view. First, I perceive Google as a very tangible and real threat to current business models. Nonetheless, I also feel that when it comes to technologies such as Exchange and Office, Microsoft has such a strong stranglehold on marketshare, that it would be difficult for a company like Google to displace it in the short term. The reality is that their "online" offerings offer only a subset of the full functionality of the Office products. Furthermore, for a company to switch to a different office platform requires training and monetary resources that transcend the cost of the actual software. While I don't see Google as an immediate threat, the paradigm shift of software from the PC to the network as a service is VERY real. The fact that Google is launching apps in this model proves that they "get" this long term vision. Whether we like it or not, Software as a Service is very real, and will be the future of computing. All of the big players, including Microsoft and Google see this, and the Hosting industry is in a great position to capitalize off of this momentum if they are smart. The hosting companies that survive this next wave are the ones that will be able to transition from simple web and email hosting models to the more complex wave of SaaS.
-Deven Kampenhout 3 cool things from Microsoft Hosting Summit 2007 -- Day 1Here are three cool things that were mentioned at the Microsoft Hosting Summit. Some of the things here are things I knew about but until now have not been at liberty to discuss.
1) This morning a discussion on application virtualization brought forth a demonstration on the SoftGrid/Softricity where basically applications can be streamed virtually to a desktop from a server. For example let's say you did not won't to deploy office to all of your desktops. The demonstration showed a scenario where word could be launched from the server but have the look and feel as if it were launched locally from the desktop. This is really cool stuff and will have a tremendous impact once made available to hosters. All those guys that have to offer services through Terminal Services will have better options for deploying desktop apps.
2) This is something I've known for a while, but better now than never. Scott Guthrie and Bill Staples demo'ed for the hosting community a feature that we have been begging for. Shared IIS configurations. Where multiple servers can use the same configuration stored on a UNC share. This will make deploying server farms a whole lot easier.
3) Also Scott Guthrie mentioned today that IIS7 will have a service feature that will make supporting videos with WPF/E much easier. Look out flash player.
There will be more to come as the conference continues. I truly believe this is becoming the premier industry event more than 340 customers and partners with another 150+ Microsoft employees here to discuss hosting.
-Kiyotito Leverette Chris Samson's Thoughts on Summit SessionsMichael O'Hara: "Welcoming Remarks & Housekeeping" Good, generalized overview of SMSG organizations support of hosting, it would have been nice to provide more enthusiasm for our overall hosting solutions, group and initiatives for the industry, the audience needed it John Zanni: "Hosting State of the Union" "Entry of the giants" around office and windows live good to bring up issue everyone's mind head on, net-net, MS has to compete against Google, Salesforce and take advantage of demand/opportunity, could have definitely used more detail and clarity about how our hosting partners could work with us in these areas. The UC video was good and demonstrated many of all the features of Exchange 2007, Windows SharePoint Services, UM, why didn't people seem excited? Build vs buy slide was excellent with regard to decision to host HMC or look to a white label hoster Andy Lees: "Driving Growth via Software + Services" Great summary of the work done and the work left to do for the hosting/SaaS space, especially around MS overall and linking our hosting teams, Windows and Office Live Scott Guthrie: "Technology for the Hosting Industry" Showed great commitment to the hosted solutions (Windows-Based Hosting), but what are the areas that really excite him and what is the vision? -Chris Samson Hoster Spotlight - Intermedia.NETRurik Bradbury, VP of marketing
William Toll, product marketing manager
Intermedia.NET
New York
Awareness. Hosted Exchange is a tremendously profitable service offering for us that’s still has surprisingly low visibility in non-IT circles.
We’ve been a Microsoft partner since 1996. We were the first hosting provider to target the SMB market with Hosted Exchange and were also the first to offer a private label Hosted Exchange offering in 2001. That business has been a particular strength as we now host more than 2,000 private labeled solutions.
We’d like to see Microsoft continue to elevate its commitment to the hosting industry through its emphasis on marketing and through enabling its own salesforce. Hoster Spotlight - DatapipeBill Dolan, VP of business development
Datapipe
Hoboken, New Jersey
We’ve seen tremendous demand and growth over the past year as we’ve launched new services. We’ve recently announced two new datacenters and are anticipating continued growth. Our biggest challenge at this stage is creating awareness and marketing our new and existing services.
We’ve been a long-time Microsoft partner and are Gold Certified. Our business is evenly split between Microsoft and Unix, which is completely driven by customer demand.
Our mission is to be honest, agile and intelligent. We look to Microsoft, and our other partners, to help us address those core values. But more specifically, we look to Microsoft’s marketing heft to help elevate the benefits of the hosting model. Although the hosting industry has been around for a long time, the majority of businesses aren’t aware that they can have all of the benefits of enterprise-class tools without the headaches. March 12 What is the Microsoft Global Hosting Summit?The Microsoft Global Hosting Summit is an annual, invitation-only event for Microsoft’s hosting partners taking place March 19 – 21, 2007. The event is comprised of speaking sessions that cover important topics impacting the industry today, including software-as-a-service, unified communications and an update on Microsoft’s “Live” strategy. The breakout sessions will be organized into the following four tracks: small business hosting, hosting applications, Microsoft technology insights and “hot topics” in the industry. In addition to key speakers from within the walls of Microsoft, the Hosting Summit will feature two guest presenters, Andy Schroepfer, president & founder, of Tier 1 Research and Morris Miller, founder, of Sequel Ventures. Andy and Morris will provide their perspectives on the industry and thoughts on what actions hosting providers need to take to thrive in the changing business climate. Stay tuned for real-time blogging from the show, along with keynote video clips and photos!
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