Microsoft'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.
