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Mastermind Keynote: Microsoft Puts Costs High on Agenda Tuesday, 5 November 2002 Microsoft may have received the court’s judgment in its antitrust case in the United States, but “the jury is still out” in Europe. Jean-Phillipe Curtois, president of Microsoft for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said he hopes the case will be resolved by the end of the year. Curtois was speaking at a Mastermind Keynote interview at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2002 in Cannes, France on Tuesday. He told Gartner group vice president Peter Sondergaard that the company is already implementing many of the conditions set by the U.S. court. Developers can now see an additional 290 Windows application programming interfaces and license 113 communications protocols. But Curtois admitted that Microsoft needs to continue working on making its own environments integrate better with the outside world. “We are betting on Internet standards and Web services for interoperability,” he said. Accepting that cost is a major issue for CIOs today, Curtois defended Microsoft’s Windows and Office offerings against the open source alternatives of the Linux operating system and Sun Microsystems’s StarOffice suite of office software. Curtois said Microsoft has been conducting studies into the total cost of ownership (TCO) of Linux and Windows and found that in 95 percent of cases the TCO favors Windows. The reasons, he argued are that the cost of licenses is a small part of the total and Microsoft’s Office products provide superior interoperability with other applications within and outside the enterprise. Sondergaard asked Curtois what Microsoft’s three most significant challenges are now. Describing and defining business processes will be a big challenge, Curtois answered. He said too that developing the skill sets of people would be important. “There’s a lot of re-skilling going on, but probably not enough.” Finally, he sought to align Microsoft with most CIOs by highlighting costs. “We have to have very fast returns on investment and our projects typically aim for less than a year to pay back the investment.” One area that will take time is Microsoft’s “long journey” to trustworthy computing. Curtois said there will be millions of unmanaged devices - like mobile phones and PDAs - and the whole industry will have to work hard on initiatives to deliver the ability for people to conduct secure end-to-end transactions. For the immediate future, Curtois said CIOs should be working on costs by taking opportunities to standardize and consolidate their systems. They should also aim to “bring back onto the agenda what they can deliver to the business” by ensuring that IT and business requirements are in alignment. That will mean being more proactive with the business interests of enterprises. Microsoft itself, he said, would be working to deliver on costs and partnering with other companies to get the cost message across while also doing better on trust. Jonathan Green-Armytage Gartner Staff |
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