Hosts Find Niche at Microsoft Show
By Liam Eagle, theWHIR.com
July 18, 2006 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Microsoft’s (microsoft.com) Worldwide Partner Conference, held last week in Boston, was a big event by any standard – with more than 7,000 partners in attendance, it was no-hotel-rooms-left-in-the-city big. And playing host to so many guests, the software giant displayed an impressive commitment to its business philosophies and to lavish spectacle.
In a main conference hall vast enough to house a Springsteen concert, partners gathered for a series of keynote presentations by the likes of CEO Steve Ballmer and Allison Watson, vice president of Microsoft’s worldwide partner and small business groups, as well as a series of product demonstrations introducing a new generation of Microsoft applications and their accompanying business opportunities.
The event veered occasionally into well-intentioned foolishness – a Da Vinci Code parody promoting Microsoft’s Small Business Server software and an X-Men-inspired video championing the partners themselves, for instance – and once or twice into the almost surreal, such as the multi-ethnic guitar-rock-and-DJ-scratching-accompanied rapping and dancing software partner anthem that kicked off day two. But the odd diversion aside, the Worldwide Partner Conference 2006 was all business – an almost overwhelmingly thorough account of Microsoft’s partner network, a significant industry in its own right.
Since the vast majority of Microsoft’s partners fall into one of the software vendor, equipment manufacturer or systems integrator categories, hosting service providers were a thinly represented element among both the attendees and the sessions. Most of the information on offer had to do with software development, or employing the features of Microsoft’s new tools in the office environment.
Hosting played a role in the proceedings however, with the few Web hosting partners visibly in attendance consciously eyeing what might be described as niche opportunities.
In the airplane-hangar-sized exhibit hall, Web hosting provider and Microsoft gold certified partner Data Return (datareturn.com) demonstrated its Infinistructure solution, a capacity-on-demand hosting solution the company feels is perfectly suited to meet the emerging demand for infrastructure to support the delivery of software as a service.
A big part of Microsoft’s message at the conference was its commitment to the SaaS model. The company is betting big with its own Windows Live undertakings and is encouraging software partners to pursue the delivery of their solutions in the same way.
Data Return says the ISVs in attendance, fresh from sessions of SaaS evangelizing, were very receptive to the Infinistructure pitch. Launched at the end of 2005, says Data Return, Infinistructure is a “a breakthrough [in] on-demand infrastructure for running business-critical applications with unprecedented flexibility and economy.”
Not far from Data Return’s installation, Web hosting provider NaviSite (navisite.com) demonstrated solutions for a different set. Another Microsoft gold certified partner, the company has long offered support for hosted Microsoft Exchange and Dynamics. In the WPC exhibit hall, though, NaviSite was demonstrating a new solution, co-developed with Microsoft that the company said was set for launch in the next few weeks.
The new solution, says NaviSite, is a developer “sandbox” solution, that offers software builders with the opportunity to build and test their applications in a production environment, before they make it live. Of course, in the Microsoft Partner Conference environment, the company had the perfect setting for testing the water with the new solution, which was very well received, according to NaviSite.
Hosting wasn’t totally absent from the conference’s sessions. Tuesday, at 2:00 Microsoft’s Morgan Cole presented on the market for hosted solutions, including the demand generated by hosted applications. He discussed Microsoft’s Solution for Windows-Based Hosting, with the assistance of John Engates, CTO of hosting provider Rackspace Managed Hosting (rackspace.com).
And, of course, there was plenty of interest for hosting providers among the sessions describing the features of new versions of the Windows Server and SQL server solutions, among others.
While hosting may not have been at the forefront of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference agenda, the hosts in attendance were prepared to capitalize on the fact that many of the attendees were potential customers of their new tools.
