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Recession is an opportunity: Microsoft

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: Surviving the recession is top priority for any IT company. Organisations are opting for various avenues to tackle the recession, while few of them are playing wait and watch.

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Some say, this recession is small as compared to previous recessions in 2001 and 1990 and few believe in being optimistic to prepare for the worst.

To overcome the situation, industry analysts opine that adoption of open source software will benefit IT industry and with the latest survey reports, we can see large amount of developer community adopting open source software for day-to-day work.

In an interaction with Abhigna N G from CIOL, Tarun Gulati, general manager, Business Strategy, Marketing and Operations Microsoft India talked about the views of Microsoft in adoption of open source software, way forward for proprietary software versus open source products.

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75 pc developers employ open source in APAC

Gulati also talked about the products developed by Microsoft to increase developer productivity and the work being done at the Interoperability lab.

Excerpts:

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CIOL: Industry analysts believe open source software will gain market share from proprietary software companies during the tougher economic times, how Microsoft is prepared to compete with competitors?

Tarun Gulati: If I understand correctly you mean Linux over Windows operating system. If we look at the facts, Windows continues to lead in the consumer PC segment as also validated by various 3rd party studies such as IDC.

One of the reasons why anyone looks at Linux is the perception that it is free. However, various studies have clearly shown that it is actually more expensive over 3 to 5 year time frame. And in today’s environment of economizing, customers are looking at higher long term ROI from every IT investment and not short-term benefits.

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Top five trends in open source

It is also important to note that open source is not a product but rather an approach to software development. Microsoft does not compete with any model including open source model. We firmly believe that multiple platforms can and should co-exist and recognize both the advantages of open source and the fact that platform heterogeneity is a reality in today’s environment.

CIOL: Elaborate some of the open source technologies that Microsoft has adopted to increase developer productivity?

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TG: Microsoft provides a combination of resources that enable developers to learn, be creative, and solve problems collaboratively, using whatever approach they choose. This commitment includes programs and partnerships to help developers connect with one another to collaborate and exchange ideas, including source code collaboration sites, such as CodePlex, as well as online communities for peer assistance.

Skyway Builder to increase developer productivity

Some of the open source applications available today are IronPython, ASP.NET AJAX, SharePoint Learning Kit, and WiX on CodePlex and SourceForge. Other initiatives and open source projects include:

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* Silverlight, a cross platform, cross browser plug-in available on Mac

* Suse Linux Enterprise Server - Interoperability of Windows with Linux in partnership with Novell

* Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) to help organizations address the specific problems of porting UNIX- based applications to Windows

* Deki Wiki - first cross-platform open source wiki with application logic written entirely in the Microsoft Visual C# and the Microsoft .NET Framework.

* Windows Vista and Firefox interoperability in partnership with Mozilla

* In 1999, Microsoft developed Windows Installer XML (WiX). A pioneering open source project for Microsoft, WiX is now used widely by development teams in various industries to build installations

* Rotor was the first project with source code availability at Microsoft, which is a essentially a subset of ,NET framework.

 

CIOL: How do you collaborate with they open source community? What's the way forward for proprietary software companies?

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TG: When we compete with commercialized open source solutions on value to win customers, we also collaborate with the open source community to help effectively address the interoperability needs of our customers. This, we believe will remain the way forward for all vendors in today’s environment. Every company that traditionally comes from an open-source background has over time moved to the middle after realizing that in addition to the open-source foundation, they also need proprietary offerings that will differentiate their services from others and therefore will enable them to build a viable business.

Open Source a successful business model

Microsoft has also made broad reaching changes to its technology and business practices to increase the openness of our products and drive greater interoperability and opportunity across the IT community of developers, partners, customers and competitors. Our aim has been to address interoperability holistically and at numerous levels in order to better connect people, data and diverse systems.

At the same time, our Software-plus-Services strategy envisions a world where rich, highly functional and elegant experiences extend from the PC, to the Web, to the devices people use every day. With this, we want to increase the voice and flexibility to our customers to access technology in a reliable, scalable, secure and seamlessly way.

CIOL: How does Microsoft plan to take advantage of the work being done at the Interoperability lab?

TG: We are planning to integrate the lab with other MS efforts to develop the local software economy. This includes setting up new Microsoft Innovation Centers in the country along with specific industry bodies to accelerate local software development.

CIOL: How do you see the global IT market evolving despite the economic slowdown?

TG: This economic slowdown is beginning to hit all businesses, and the impact this quarter will be significant. As a result, there will be some important changes in the way business is conducted. There will be increased focus on cost control. This will translate into investments in those solutions and processes that will deliver immediate term productivity or cost efficiencies.

From a technology investment perspective Microsoft has observed that the nature of dialogue with customers has changed. They are much more genuinely interested in how new technologies can see immediate results in lower costs overall or increased productivity. So there is increased discussion around technologies such as virtualization, unified communication, business intelligence, CRM which delivers rapid business success.

Many technology vendors view these times as an opportunity to work closely with their customers and show the way to a more efficient and lean business operation.

CIOL: What measures is Microsoft taking during the recession?

TG: We believe this is an opportunity for us to deliver value, to work with customers and partners to help Indian enterprise to unlock the value IT can offer, to eventually support customer business goals, especially in these tough times. To this end we will re-energize our efforts to reach out to the customers across all levels, tailoring our efforts to suit each segment.

An important thing to note is the changing parameters used to make IT purchase decisions, the focus is now shifting to the ROI, relevant timeframe, and overall TCO. Therefore, as a strongly emerging trend, we are seeing that customers are no longer looking at IT as an expense and have in fact, narrowed the window of RoI to relook at IT as an investment for long term business benefits. And this is the need that we want to address with our solutions like Unified Communications, Virtualization, Business Intelligence, CRM and ERP that help reduce considerable costs without affecting business agility.

Customers, whether big or small will also find value in our software + services model since it provides more flexibility, choice and affordability which are critical parameters of technology decisions in an environment of cost containment.

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