VSTS: Microsoft's answer to IBM's Rational

Succeeding the 18-year-old veteran Rick LaPlante was Andrew Kaas, recruited from S1. A year later, Kaas feels at home inside Microsoft trying to fill the vacuum left by LaPlante.

For him, Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) is not just a solution. It’s a way to change the culture of how to do IT.’

Ask him about Microsoft, pat comes the reply: 'We are here to change the industry.'

Before joining S1, Kass was with PeopleSoft and Oracle Corporation. He was also the founder and CEO of the privately-held Omniscient Software.

Touted as Microsoft's answer to IBM’s Rational, VSTS took six years to develop before it took off in 2005. The application lifecycle management solution is yet to overtake Rational yet Kaas has no qualms about its future.

The final release of its next version of the solution code named Orcas is likely to be available by the end of this year. The first beta release was made public last month. Meanwhile, the company is also working on the release succeeding Orcas, which is named Rosario.

The VSTS team is spread out between two main locations in the US. It also has teams in the UK and China besides another one at the Microsoft India Development Center (MIDC) in Hyderabad. The 40-member VSTS team at MIDC, which is expected to increase in the next 12 months, primarily works on the testing and verification components.

Kaas explains more about VSTS in a tête-à-tête with Kishore Kumar from CyberMedia News.

Thus far

I think it’s been absolutely fantastic. Team System’s first version – the Visual Studio 2005 - was released in November 2005. In that time frame, I think we’ve seen a lot of positive response. In general Team System is regarded as number two spot in entire second only in volume to Rational software, which has been there for eighteen past years. But the response from both the existing customers and as well new customers has been really astonishing. Customers who had used have seen a lot of ROI.

Recent leaning

We are seeing a lot of work being done more holistically at development in application. There is a bit more up leveling. The up leveling is in terms of thinking of developing an application. We have been talking to a lot of CIOs. Their main concern is around development in application, not around development tool. They want to make sure that what they invest in IT is going to impact the business. Business alignment of the work is a big focus.

There has been much stronger focus on quality and things like a security as well as usability.

We need to be more responsive and flexible. The days of massive projects taking three years to complete are gone. Business are finding hard to justify that. Businesses are evolving so rapidly. They want developers to be flexible.

SIs on job

The value they (System Integrators) bring is that they have a process, they have a methodology they can do things in a more repeatable fashion. They are more predictable.

We also partner both as customers with a lot of the large Indian SIs who use Team System internally. We also partner with SIs such that they can actually help implement and provide the capability to their customers directly.

Great expectations

I expect to see massive penetration from the testing market. We are also looking at growth with SIs and corporate IT both large and small.

Our market is pretty well distributed internationally. More than 50 of our business are international. India is definitely a big market because of the growth of IT industry here. We’re starting to have big growth in Europe, as well as certain countries in Asia, Asia Pacific. The US of course has been a fantastic market.

Actually we have been pretty impressed with the consistent demand. There has been no saturation.

Direct sales

We don’t typically direct sale. What we have is an evangelism team. We do have a team where people get engaged with customer and educate them. We actually have been investing more in that.

Forward-looking

Our strategy is to focus on building integrated set of tools from the beginning. A lot of solutions out there in the market are assembled. There are a lot point solutions. We actually think that the right answer is to provide very productive tools for individual but in a team context of framework. So everything we do is built on the concept of collaboration. Everything we do is integration across the lifecycle designed to be extensible and have third party built on it.

Innovation keeps calling

Historically people have paid very little attention to the testing processes. We are doing innovative things in that area. I think there is massive amount of innovation and improvement that we are coming. A lot of them are breaking down the barriers between different people involved. We have some interesting ideas to make different processes.

And there are hurdles as well

I think the biggest challenge for us is simply trying to determine what stuff to do out of the galaxy of things we want to do. When I look at the ideas we have on our list, of all the things what customers like us to do. The hardest part is actually trying to narrow that down.

We have other challenges like operational challenges. With a large team which is distributed across, we get access to the best of worldwide talent. For that we need to do extra level of communication, coordination and alignment. That exactly is the problem we are trying to solve through Team System.

We only want to hire the best of people yet keep our bar higher. We are a big growth business for the company.