At its IT Forum event in Barcelona Microsoft said it has had trial runs with selected customers on messaging and desktop management but cautioned that it sees the project as being at the “incubation” stage.
“We have a couple of customers where we’re providing their infrastructure [as
a service],” said Bob Muglia, senior vice-president for Microsoft’s server and
tools
business.
“There are a percentage of customers that will want to acquire some of their
IT infrastructure as a service. These would not be highly customised
environments but
[based on] a reasonably limited set of choices. We’re operational now and we’ll
begin to take on more customers within the next year or so.”
Muglia added that Microsoft was likely to focus on messaging and collaboration as desktop management “still needs some work”.
He also hinted that Microsoft needs to design around a multi-tenancy model
where software consumed by multiple organisations is run side by side on
servers.
Although endorsed by Salesforce.com, some vendors such as SAP have sought to
play down the importance of the model.
“Exchange 2003 works quite well but [generally] our software [is designed]
for one corporate entity on the server [whereas] it needs to be aware there may
be
many enterprises on a server farm,” Muglia said.
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