Microsoft Expands On-Demand Services - SaaS Week

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March 03, 2008
Microsoft Expands On-Demand Services

Microsoft has made an important announcement from its annual SharePoint conference: it is expanding the online versions of Exchange and SharePoint applications and will today unveil the new offerings.

The IT media is ablaze with discussion of the importance of the announcement, especially after a few days of speculation that Microsoft would expand its SaaS offerings in some way. IT Week posted a brief commentary noting that SaaS has been posing an increasing threat to Microsoft with every month that passes but pointing out that managing the transition could be challenging. IT Week quotes Gartner's Matt Cain as saying:

Microsoft is retrofitting its existing software to the multi-tenant server model. It won't be until the next version of Exchange (due in 2011) that its core products are better architected to run in a multi-tenant SaaS model.

ZDNet's Larry Dignan has posted an insightful commentary, summing up Microsoft's current and past efforts pretty well as, "If you’re the software giant the game plan is to turn SaaS and the cloud into a feature." He says that many were disappointed with the announcement, as they had hoped for a cloud version of MS Office after the buzz that had been growing. Dignan concludes that Microsoft's cautious SaaS strategy might look like a mistake decades from now but that for now it could be viewed as a hedging of bets.

InfoWorld's Paul Krill also summarized the announcement but made the distinction between the new services that Microsoft would offer with SharePoint vs. what it would gain if it succeeds in acquiring Yahoo. Krill quotes Microsoft'sKirk Koenigsbauer as saying:

"They're used for what's called enterprise search, which is search inside the firewall," Koenigsbauer said. Users could, for example, search for an employee claim form, a Word document, a report, or a map of a building on the corporate campus. "A single Search Server can crawl up to 50 million documents in what we call the index."

What are your thoughts on the new announcements? Be sure to post your comments below.