Peter Christy

Microsoft Bangs the Virtual Drum

In what is bound to be only the first round in loud and endless rolling thunder, Microsoft officially released virtualization. Nothing earthshaking was new. The standalone bare metal hypervisor was released earlier than most expected. Hyper-VMotion was demonstrated and seemed to work. Mostly I think it was Microsoft starting to show some of their powerful assets like customers, business partners and the ability to spend $100M on marketing (or whatever) when they want to. As we've been saying for some time -- Game on! VMware better forget the healthy and eco-friendly lifestyle and learn quickly to be street fighters (maybe Oracle will buy VMW -- that would make the game fun!)

Virtualization at 50,000 feet

So here's a view on what's happening (the proverbial "big picture"): (1) MS has successfully queered the virtualization price structure making VMW offer the hypervisor for free. (2) That makes it clear that VMW isn't going to grow just selling the technology -- it's the higher level systems and management tools that you'll get paid for -- so they have repositioned themselves as a data center O/S company. (3) But that means that they are in a sense admitting that MS has been right all along -- virtualization is important but it's only one piece of a puzzle -- it makes VMW's position against MS scarier. (4) The vision is now clearer -- we want services that can be moved flexibly throughout a resource fabric (enterprise data center and cloud service provider) -- and we want an individual to be able to get to his personal (virtual) system from more or less anywhere and anything in the world. This is the attractive future that virtualization promises. The problem is that compared to virtualizing a single server this is really difficult system engineering and is going to take a lot of work to accomplish. Progress is going to start to slow down fairly dramatically as we collectively grind on these really hard problems. Don't get impatient. Sit down, watch a baseball game, smell the roses.

The Microsoft POLP

 Despite the name this isn't what might be found by Steve Ballmer's most recent colonoscopy. Instead it stands for Protocol Optimization Licensing Program and it's how Cisco, Riverbed and others work with Microsoft and develop optimization solutions for key Microsoft protocols (e.g., MAPI) without the risk (technical and legal) of having to reverse engineering the base protocol. Riverbed's recent press release talked of this as a "partnership" but that's probably not quite the right word to use (in fact these protocol license documents explicitly say they aren't partnerships because that has specific meaning in Washington State commercial law). Although Microsoft provides access to these protocols they still pretty much control things because of the many patents underlying the protocols. Understanding the protocol doesn't mean you can implement it (because of the patents) nor build "derivative" works (what has to be done for WAN optimization). That only comes with an explicit license agreement (e.g., POLP) that includes a nominal payment and more to the point also gives MS forgiveness on any patent violation they might have doing their own version of the optimized protocol (cross licensing). I'm not sure I would call that a "partnership."

Microsoft's Assault on Identity Management

At TechEd Microsoft announced Beta 3 of Identity Life Cycle Manager Version 2, hardly an earthshaking announcement given that the product won't ship for quite a time, but a great opportunity to talk to the ILM team and better understand their current plans. That was pretty eye-opening. First, MS quoted respectable research that says that Active Directory is used as the primary directory in 92% of the F1000. I love confusing market statistics. It would be another thing entirely to say that 90% of F1000 enterprises used AD (and much less interesting). 92% is a pretty stunning number and that context I think that ILM will also be a pretty big thing pretty quickly. A modern identity management system consists of a set of different directories and a scheme for keeping their contents coordinated, typically by use a meta-directory system that understands which subordinate directory is the authoritative source for information that is then shared with others. For example, HR is authoritative for new employees while something in the network assigns them IP addresses. ILM has a meta-directory and coordinates AD and other directories as well. What is innovative in ILM is that the operation takes IT out of the picture except where IT the authoritative source for directory information. For example, HR would provision a new employee record, their manager would define their role and then owners of various assets and services would approve their use based on the role they play. Historically IT would own and run the directory infrastructure and be responsible for making changes. The problem with this design is that IT is rarely the authority for directory information. With ILM business rule and workflow can be specified that define the constraints and process for making directory changes. Microsoft has lots of interesting business rule and workflow mechanisms to bring to bear. In most cases the change approval process is run via forms though the Exchange email solution. The solution design (driven by individuals and the organization, not IT) sounds right, and given Microsoft's dominance already in the core directory business will ILM be the next domino to tip in the favor of Redmond?

Where's Oslo?

(not to be confused with Where's Waldo -- my adorable Corgi) The faithful reader might remember my comments from TechEd 2007 where Microsoft rolled out Dynamic IT, and when I asked Muglia "So Bob, where's the beef?" his answer, in brief was "Oslo," a major effort lead by Robert Wahbe and the Connected Systems part of STB, to improve the ability to build "process led, model driven" complex application structures. Mu's passion made the topic very real, and I've been waiting patiently (not) to see the details. I had hoped Oslo would be out'ed at Mix08, and when that didn't happen at MMS 2008, and when that failed at TechEd 2008. At the TechEd 2008 analyst meeting details of Oslo were still missing, so of course I cornered Mu during a coffee break and asked "So where's Oslo?" Mu rolled his eyes as only an SVP of software development and explained with a somewhat pained face that the Oslo architecture team liked to get things really right so there had been a few unplanned iterations, but that Oslo was alive and well in Redmond and would see the brilliant light of day at PDC 2008 later this year in LA. Am I just the ultimate Microsoft analyst groupie keeping the faith while marketecture is spun into my face, as my network friends believe must be true? Perhaps, but of course I think not. Microsoft is way ahead of the market in having specific plans for addressing the incredible complexity of modern applications ("process led and model driven" maps pretty directly into "lower cost of ownership" in the big picture). I still believe that Oslo will turn out to be important in this context, but I guess I have to wait some more to understand precisely why.

Structure 08 (the Invisible Elephant in the Room)

GigaOM held an interesting, sold out one day meeting on the emerging Cloud. There was only one flaw, or in fact I am completely over the hill and deluded (a possibility). To listen to the discussion here, Microsoft isn't a player (to be fair to the rest, Microsoft does an amazing job NOT talking about their Live plans). It seems to me that this is at first blush a two-horse race -- Google and Microsoft. SaaS isn't a children's crusade. Eventually it takes huge CapEx and OpEx investments to play. It isn't at all clear that even a $1B player like SalesForce has the financial chops to survive against the big players with big resources. Let's say this was an interesting exploration of ideas but without anyone obviously asking the pivotal business questions. Oh to be one of those "other" analysts that doesn't want to be bothered by the business bits...

Let the Hypervisor Wars Begin!

Microsoft seems to be feeling reasonably good about Hyper-V. Microsoft VP Bob Muglia reports it is functionally complete and performance complete and what remains is ringing out the bugs (as far as I can tell the stability is pretty good already). Mu said it was very surprising to him when they did their first performance testing against VMware ESX last fall and found the HV performance to be in the ballpark. When I first met Bob he was a Windows NT product manager. A key workload for NT was File Server and the competition was Drew Major's NetWare (as regular readers will now, Drew is in my pantheon of software gods). It took Microsoft until NT 4 to be performance comparable with NetWare so you can imagine Mu's surprise and pleasure to find HV Alpha code in the ballpark. The comparison between HV and ESX is complex. Microsoft knows it will take some time to catch up with the full VMW functionality. On the other hand, out of the box HV is supported by System Center, a much more comprehensive management system than virtual center. And just make things interesting and weird, MS announced and demonstrated System Center managing ESX, and MS support for management of key UNIX variants (along with OpenSourcing the integration technology). So this time MS is the heterogeneous, embracing vendor (that clearly tickles Mu too). How this all plays out is yet to be seen. MS points out that they know how to coordinate virtualization with Windows and key MS applications better than anyone and that should be quite valuable (e.g., to make virtual infrastructure memory management more efficient). In any case, MS is cranking up all the MS sales and competitive engines so things should get lively. When I pressed Mu at the MMS analyst meeting to say how we should observe competitive progress he said that after 18 months in the market if they weren't shipping more hypervisors than VMW he would be very disappointed. "Microsoft is very good at high-volume, low-cost software you know" (Hyper-V is priced at $28 if you missed that). Game very much about to be on.

System Center -- Front and Center

I've been attending the Microsoft Management Summit for three years now and the evolution is worth watching. The management effort began in earnest five years ago when Bob Muglia faced the fact that manageability was a liability for Windows server and hired Kirill Tatarinov from BMC to fix the problem. Kirill and his team developed a 10 year vision around the "dynamic systems initiative." The initial reasoning for the effort was that with good systems management Windows Server could have superior overall cost-of-ownership compared to alternatives like LINUX. The management systems team developed a pretty good plan and Muglia put his money where his mouth was. I think it's fair to say that five years into this ten year plan systems management is now a Windows Server asset rather than a liability. A little over a year ago the discussion started to move to focus on System Center (the Microsoft branding for the whole product line) as a profitable line of business rather than just a Windows Server asset. From what we heard at MMS we're estimating that the product line will close this year just south of $1B certainly a credible number even within MS. Perhaps more interesting, System Center (in turn built on SQL Server) is becoming a focal point for the virtualization strategy (virtualization management integrated with hardware, operating system and application management in contrast to VMware's "virtualization is everything" strategy) and also now at the core of Microsoft's Forefront Security as well. Muglia still describes it as five years into a ten year vision, and speaks to more sophisticated model-based applications (I'm expecting that some of these ideas will become clearer in the forthcoming Oslo release). The analyst meetings at MMS are getting a lot more popular (they used to be intimate little events).

Ray Ozzie Meshes Things Up

The services shoes that I spoke of around the MIX 08 conference are starting to drop left and right. Microsoft has begun a technical Beta for the Live Mesh service and put some quite informative videos up on the Web. I've known some of Ray's core team since back in our mutual DEC days (the team started at UIUC earlier, and really coagulated at Iris Associates, the group that did Lotus Notes). Then some of them moved on to Groove and hence to Microsoft. Ray has been doing "sync" for a long time through many generations and refinements of products (at the core of Notes and Groove for sure). Not unexpectedly sync is at the root of Live Mesh (as Ray said would be the case earlier). When I told one of our networking friends he should really take at look at Live Mesh, his answer was "It's just file replication, right?" to suggest his disinterest. It is about file replication. But if you think about it, intelligent file replication is at the core of how we use computers. In Live Mesh you can define a Mesh of devices or people that share specific information. At the simplest you mesh together your computers, phones and MP3 players and share music and photos. In business applications you can collaborate using various forms of documents (IRG runs on Groove collaboration of this form). Notes was a heavyweight structure with high administrative burden. Groove is still pretty heavyweight in terms of the client size but doesn't require any IT admin. Live Mesh is much lighter weight on the client end in part because it's a refined and elegant design and in part because a node in the cloud is a necessary part and the greater complexity can be put there. So in addition to syncing your devices and friends, there is a cloud version that's always up to date and can be accessed via a browser. If you have an application that can run on your PC then it uses a local version of the meshed data and synchronizes it back to the mesh as changes are made (analogous to how modern Outlook cached operation works with Exchange). You can run a PC application in the cloud (they provide a version of .NET Framework that runs in the Live cloud). Or you can write the application in a Web 2.0 mode (more natural for the cloud) and MS supports running it locally on the PC. Very interesting! But wait, there's more. Suppose Microsoft sold a subscription to an up to date Windows and Office "image" and every time you accessed the cloud with one of your computers it was automatically updated with no burden to you (now we have sort of the mōka5 version). Or if you merge it with what MS is doing with SoftGrid (a strong part of the desktop virtualization portfolio) it becomes applications on demand. It's all just file replication but if you do file replication elegantly (as Groove certainly does) it is way cool technology.

Debra Unveils More About Live:

The final keynote at MMS was Debra Chrapaty, Microsoft's Corporate VP of Windows Live Operations, speaking about all those data centers Microsoft has been visibly building. Debra is getting increasing exposure as Microsoft rolls out Live services (Debra is also scheduled to speak at the upcoming Google developer meeting). She's a delight to listen to if you get a chance (accurately describes herself as a WYSIWYG kind of person). She confirmed the sense I got from talking to the Cloud Data Services team at MIX 2008 -- it's definitely game on in terms of services. Debra said MS is adding 10,000 servers a month. The MS total server count is much smaller than Google's -- maybe a third of a million to GOOG's 2M -- but to paraphrase Everett Dirksen, 10,000 servers here, 10,000 servers there, after a while it starts to add up to real compute power! The next 18 months are going to be fun to watch not to mention to experience.