BEIJING, June 12 (Xinhuanet)-- Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie on Sunday said the company is creating Internet-delivered services for corporate customers to complement its on-premise software.
Ozzie, speaking at Microsoft's TechEd 2006 conference for business technology users, described some of the online services Microsoft intends to offer to businesses, including single sign-on and network management.
While Microsoft has launched consumer-oriented online services, such as Windows Live, until now, it has not fully explained how it sees the trend affecting companies.
Ozzie said that Microsoft's strategy is to offer a full line of services as an extension to existing client and server software, much in keeping with a notion first described by Chairman Bill Gates last fall.
For example, corporate customers could connect a Windows network to a hosted management or security service. Or a sales person could do a single search across his desktop PC, corporate network and the Web at once, Ozzie said.
"Microsoft is taking a very pragmatic approach, a seamless, blended client-server-services approach...where services complement and extend Windows and Office applications to the Internet," he said.
He said that services represent the next major disruption in the IT industry, much like the PC revolution and the Web.
Right now, hosted Web services, such as Web e-mail and instant messaging, are having a bigger impact with consumers than businesses. But Ozzie predicted that corporations will be able to take advantage of the service infrastructure now being built by companies like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo.
"Like the PC and the cell phone and e-mail before, this (computing) infrastructure will benefit every segment--individuals, small businesses, to enterprises, to governments," he said. "These investments portend a fundamental change in computing and communications."
He said Microsoft intends to create services that IT professionals and developers can access with their existing Windows skills.
To promote the creation of mash-up applications using Microsoft Live-branded services, the company launched the beta of a new informational Web site called Windows Live Dev on Friday. Enditem
(Agencies)
