Mary Jo Foley has a list of 15 market opportunities that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer feels are promising.

Ballmer is psyched about Windows and Office, in both the consumer/small business market and the enterprise IT realm. XBox/XBox Live, adCenter and Windows Mobile make the cut, and he thinks anti-piracy crackdowns will generate huge savings. Zune, IPTV and Healthcare are also expected to be winners.

Server/database/security products are mentioned, but NOT hosting providers as a distribution channel. On the other hand, Office Live IS on the list, along with "business services, particularly the Exchange/Office Communications Server hosting that Microsoft is testing with three or four large customers". Oh, and Ballmer told Wall Street analysts that he's "building a cloud platform".

I get the feeling that Microsoft is more focused on its own hosting ambitions than enabling hosting partners. What do you think?

Sun announced earlier that it will start using Intel processors in its x86 servers. AMD has had an exclusive since 2005. The first Sun/Xeon machines will come off production lines mid-year. Meanwhile, as Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz puts it, "Intel has anointed Solaris as The Mission Critical Unix for Intel/Xeon"; the two companies will collaborate to "make Solaris absolutely scream on Xeon". This, he adds, is the real news from his point of view.

Jon Stokes from Ars Technica agrees. He says in a "post-GHz-race world", it makes sense for Intel to "beef up its knowledge of and influence on the OS and application layers of the x86 system stack by partnering with whole widget makers" - or companies like Sun and Apple who produce both hardware and software. Jon points out that not long ago, Microsoft, too, reached across the hardware/software dividing line and put together an in-house chip design team.

So... if:

(a) Solaris screams on Xeon, and
(b) IDC and Gartner say that Sun - and therefore Solaris - seems to be gaining market share, and
(c) The enterprise users who have been buying Solaris servers will soon run out of data center space, and
(d) Sun hardware won't be the only destination for Solaris-optimized Xeon chips. Intel will also become a Solaris distributor through its whitebox servers business...

Might it be possible that you'd be called upon to support Solaris servers in your data center in the not to far future? The adoption rate of those Sun/Xeon servers will be worth keeping an eye on.

Everyone's talking about Microsoft's soon-to-be-released Windows Home Server ("WHS"). It's a new operating system that's based on Windows Server 2003 (future editions will be based on the upcoming Longhorn Server). Microsoft's current plans are to offer it on an OEM-only basis. HP and others will start offering hardware packages later this year.

Bill Gates unveiled the WHS during his keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show. He envisions a server in every living room, so that Microsoft can "give you connected experiences 24-hours a day". It will monitor security patches/virus definitions/drive health/etc on all Windows PCs on your home network, and back up all of their data. It also offers Zune and XBox connectivity, so you can use it to store all of your music/photos/videos for easy access from any Microsoft-powered device. Wired calls it total convergence.

And of course, content stored on the WHS will be available over the Internet! The product preview mentions a "free customizable Windows Live website", and CNet reports that customers will get "personalized Internet addresses with no monthly fees". In other words, why sign up for a hosting account - to which you have to go through the trouble of uploading your data - when you can selectively web-enable whatever home-hosted content you wish?

The WHS' storage methodology is pretty nifty, BTW. Ars Technica reports that users won't see a C:\ drive - just a single, expandable storage pool. The capacity of any internal, external or USB drives on any computer can be added to the central store. WHS duplicates all data across two or more disks for redundancy. In addition to automated, incremental file backups, WHS takes scheduled snapshots of client systems, with which customers can perform full restores.

I've been reading up on RHEL5. Beta 2 came out last Friday; it includes Xen. Official release is planned for early 2007, and most hosting providers won't support it immediately. Still, (assuming you don't already have answers) now might be the time to start thinking about how it'll impact your provisioning, support and license tracking systems.

Xen lets multiple operating systems run on the same server. In this interview, Red Hat senior product management director Scott Crenshal says you will be able to install RHEL5 on "a certain number" of virtual environments for free. Within a web hosting environment, this raises some interesting questions:

1. Many data centers offer automated OS installs on physical servers - but what if a customer wanted to run FreeBSD, Debian and RHEL5 within three separate Xen instances on the same box?

2. Until now, shared hosting resellers have had to choose which control panel to run on each server. With RHEL5, they could offer cPanel, Plesk, Ensim, HSphere, Webmin... simultaneously. But does your license management database have the ability to track such combinations?

3. How would a customer submit support requests for cPanel errors, let's say, on one of many Xen instances on his server? Should there be separate IDs for each virtual environment within your ticketing system? In addition, your support team would have to be relatively up to speed on Xen.

4. I was telling my friend Jeff Huckaby over at RackAid that it'd be cool for developers to run separate web/app/db virtual servers on the same machine and move them out to separate physical servers as their sites grow. Of course, they'd want to maintain each Xen instance's IP address throughout the migration. Does your network architecture support beyond-the-box IP portability?

5. Back in June, Gartner predicted that 40% of mid-size businesses will use server virtualization technology by 2007. RHEL5 will no doubt expedite adoption. Unfortunately, according to Gartner, virtualization will cause companies to use 20% fewer servers. Will you make up any impact this might have by reaching out to a larger number of customers? Offering more value added services?

According to this Silicon.com article, Gartner is calling for Red Hat customers to switch to Oracle's Unbreakable Linux. Oracle's cut-rate support, Gartner says, will be a threat to Red Hat's future. So now's the time to start working with Oracle on compatibility-testing mission critical systems. For those who've been happy with Red Hat, Gartner suggests asking for a 50% to 70% discount.

On the other hand, Reuters reports that Red Hat is not planning to reduce its prices. The company's also launched a $325 million stock buy-back program. CEO Matthew Szulik even told CNBC that he plans to continue Red Hat's "very productive 7-year relationship" with Oracle. Oracle's salesforce has been offering Red Hat products along with Oracle software.

Red Hat was trading at $16.54 a few minutes ago, down from the $20s last month, but up from the $13s last week.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison took 10% off Red Hat's stock price this afternoon when he announced that Oracle will offer free downloads of Red Hat Linux, and lower-cost updates and support. CNet reports that Ellison plans to sell "Unbreakable Linux 2.0" to any Red Hat customer - not just Oracle users:

"If your application runs on Red Hat today, that application will run unchanged when you're getting Oracle support," Ellison said. "It's very important not to fragment the Linux market. Every time Red Hat comes out with a new version, we're going to sync our version with that version. All we add is bug fixes."

Oracle will offer software updates for $99, and tech support for $399 on servers with up to two processors. And in case you were worried, Oracle will indemnify purchasers of its service plans against potential SCO lawsuits.

According to MarketWatch, Ellison said his decision isn't about Red Hat; he's just concerned that the lack of enterprise quality support has slowed the adoption of Linux. That's got to hurt, considering Oracle is prominently listed as a Premier Partner on Red Hat's website.

Yesterday I did a quick lookup of 14 dedicated server providers' websites; 9 offer Red Hat Enterprise. Might Oracle be a contender for their business?