Scalability Day
Remarks by Deborah Willingham
Tuesday, May 20, 1997 
New York, NY

MS. WILLINGHAM: Well, good morning. I'm going to start right out with a demonstration for you. You know, Microsoft enterprise customers really expect their mission critical applications to be available 24 hours a day and seven days a week and so that's why Microsoft is building in the automated clustering capability into Windows NT server Enterprise Edition. This clustering capability allows customers to connect to servers so that either server can share the work load or take over the workload of the other server. That's what this feature really does for them. 

I think we have a cluster that's behind me over here to my right provided by Tandem Computers and as you're aware, Tandem is a leader in delivering these cluster solutions, very high end, to financial industries, retail industries, telecommunications companies around the world.

Microsoft and Tandem formed an alliance about a year ago and with this partnership, Tandem is delivering a full range of cluster hardware and just this week or last week announced their non-stop software is now running on Windows NT.

What we're going to show in this demonstration, on server two we have the SAP application running. On server one we have a financial database associated with that SAP server and what you see with a distributed application like SAP, often times customers will share the work load across a couple of servers.
We'll be accessing this information from a PC running the Internet Explorer Browser. I'd now like to bring on stage Mike Nash, who is the director of marketing for Windows NT Server, and Mike's going to demonstrate those to you.

(Demonstration)

MS. WILLINGHAM: Thanks very much, Mike. Thank you. Well, systems like that, that provide that kind of high availability, really allow our customers to focus on their business and not have to focus on technology and that's very important to them.

Another way we allow them to focus on the business is by enabling complete solutions and the Microsoft platform has the broadest industry support, hundreds of hardware platforms, thousands of applications, 118 thousand certified service professionals to help customers architect and write and deploy those applications.

Bill mentioned in his speech the new kind of applications that customers are writing and we're finding this is more and more true across our customer base. Where historically they have, for some very good reasons, written what are kind of like stovepipe applications, they're single-purpose focused, whether that's a payroll system or it might be an inventory system or even just a single purpose like file and print or web or e-mail.

Now what they're wanting to do is have a very rich and integrated application where they can get access to data across all those platforms, regardless of where it's resident, and use that data in a very flexible fashion to roll out quite rapid application deployment so that they can use that information in their business. That's where the customer's focus is.

The platform also allows them to extend their existing infrastructure and to leverage the large investment they've made in assets that they have running inside their environment today. In fact, for the next couple of years, a large part of many IT budgets are being devoted to correcting problems associated with the year 2000 problem.

So being able to write new applications with our technology, reach that data that's sitting back on the mainframe and leaving that data on the mainframe, that's really allowing people to continue to move their business forward while they're under these budget constraints.

I'd like to tell you a few customer stories. You had an opportunity to see a little bit about the Sabre System during the video, but Sabre Business Travel Solutions was formed in 1995 and it was really to bring the power of the Sabre System to the corporate desktop.

What Sabre was finding is that corporations were changing the economics of the travel business. Instead of being so commission based, corporations were pushing them to be more transaction based and so they wanted to leverage this great asset they had in the Sabre System, but they wanted to be able to offer a new service to corporations.

They did some research and found that travel expenses are the third largest controllable expense in most large businesses, so if they could go in and allow companies to very flexibly configure travel policies, those companies would then be able to implement those travel policies and save on their travel spending, so that's what the Sabre Business Travel Solutions really do.

It's a very flexible front end, getting at the data that's still resident back in the Sabre host. They though originally when they put this together that they liked the NT solution, both because it's scaled very much on the high end, but also because it could scale down to the lower end and their hope is that they can take this same solution and market it to small and medium businesses as a travel solution as well.

They got help from Digital in architecting the solution, doing the systems integration work and Digital multi-vendor customer services is providing the ongoing service and support for this application.

They thought that most of the customers would want to actually locate the Microsoft part of this application on premises, but what they're actually finding is that customers like to use this as a service bureau type service, so Sabre is actually running a lot of the customer portion of the policies and the data back in their Tulsa operation as a service bureau and they're running that on Digital Alpha servers.

The benefit to them really was going into a whole new part of their business. They were able to offer reductions in travel costs of up to 30 percent to their corporate customers who use this service and really growing their business in a new way, all while leaving that data right up there on the main frame.

The second example is R.R. Donally Financial and they're a $450 million division of R.R. Donally & Sons. They have about 38,000 employees in 26 countries around the world, making them the world's largest commercial printer.

What they decided to do was augment their hard copy business by offering the same documents to be able to be accessed over the internet. They had a quite modest sized IT team, and so they were very concerned about the manageability and the ease of administration of the solution that they put together.

They put up an internet site, it has about 300 gigabytes of information in it today, it's going to be growing to around 600 gigabytes of information by the end of the year. They chose Windows NT Server and Internet Information Server and SQL Server because of the great integration among those products. They used Microsoft consulting services to help them architect and employ the application and they now have a single systems administrator who runs this entire service for them, serving 2,000 of their customers.

It has helped them increase their business. They're reaching customers in Eastern Europe that were not their customers before as they're being accessed over the net and they're finding that some customers who reached them first over the net now are becoming customers of their more traditional hard copy part of their businesses.

It's also allowed the end users of their printing service to double their productivity because it helps them handle some complex SEC regulations very easily through this internet based financial system.

A third example is American International Group, AIG. They had an Access AIG web site that they wanted to migrate from a Sun Netscape solution to a Microsoft solution. They found that it was much easier for them to make the kind of updates they wanted to make using active server pages and being able to change that data once in the Sequel Server and have that propagate cross the Internet site.

So they made this move to NT and IIS. What they have found is that with the help of Microsoft Consulting Services and Premier support, that they've seen the benefits of improved productivity in their end users and they have expanded their business again by using the web as a place to reach more customers.

At Microsoft, we know that having great products is not enough. We know that in the enterprise, you also need to have great services and we help 2,000 enterprises around the world who rely on Microsoft enterprise services today.
We have a different approach to our service model than the traditional one. We target our service organizations to be cost recovery, not to grow big profit making organizations. We do this for a very specific reason, so that they can stay focused on transferring knowledge about this new technology into customers and into partners.

So whereas a traditional consultant organization would worry a lot about utilization of consultants, it would be difficult sometimes to take those consultants off of billable work and retrain them on new technology. But Microsoft's consulting organization very much is trained on our newest technology and is out there helping the initial early adopters and customers architect applications and deploy this new technology.

Once those customers are deployed and we get those great customer references that help to sell the new technology, the market itself begins to grow and them more service providers see the market opportunity and then they are able to then respond with a breadth of services and the kinds of capacity of service that we really need to be able to support the kind of deployments that are going in today on Windows NT Server, Microsoft Exchange and Internet Information Server, for example.

So we have a blended model of both direct services in two focused areas, this consulting that I talked about and also Premier Technical Support, which is Microsoft's way of having our skin in the game and standing behind our product as they work inside our customers' businesses.

But our customers are also able to compliment this direct support for their Microsoft part of their environment with support from our partners, multi vendor support, a breadth of services, everything from business re-engineering services and custom application development for companies like Ernst & Young to systems integration and deployment and network integration, to outsourcing asset management. In other words, the full breadth of services that are required to run an enterprise.

We think this blended model of Microsoft focusing in where we can uniquely add value and then being willing to share knowledge, share best practices, transfer knowledge into partners and customers shows that the capacity exists for the service channel overall to meet the demand in the market place. We think this blended model provides the best choice, flexibility and value for our customers.

You may not be aware of our direct services, but they do span the entire lifecycle of applications, the planning and the building and the ongoing management of those applications. We have enterprise program management services which are a long term IT relationship, IT planning relationship, working on design and architecture, being a part of the CIO's staff.

We have technology consulting blueprints and what these are are a collection of best practices, tools and methodology that our consultants have used all around the world, packaged to help customers plan for the kind of migrations that many of them are making today.

Some migrations -- like moving to 32 bit, Microsoft Exchange deployment, migrations from one platform to another, Notes to Exchange migrations, Banyan to Windows NT migration -- these are some of the examples of technology consulting blueprints that we're delivering in the market place today.

We also share these tools and this same information with our service channel so that we're making sure that we're leveraging all of this knowledge and information broadly across the channel so that great skills and enterprise experience can be combined with information about our technology to deliver really great services in the market.

And then we also compliment that with Premier Support and this is our support offering targeted for the enterprise 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In addition to the traditional responsive technical support, in Premier, we also focus proactively on helping our customers understand before they deploy which is the right system for them, which system is going to be one that they will find supportable and highly available when they deploy it.

So we take the knowledge and information that we have from our experience in working with this technology and we share that, to help people be successful as they roll out the technology.

So again, this cost recovery model keeps us focused on the right thing, sharing information, transferring knowledge about new technology and helping grow a vibrant channel of choice of service providers for our enterprise customers.
We have a few new services I'd like to highlight. We work a lot with our customers in understanding what additional services they might want, getting feedback on the quality of those services and they've asked us for the technical account manager portion of our Premier support, to offer that on site and so this February we offered the Premier On-Site offering and that allows customers to get the same technical support that has a dedicated and focused account manager who lives and works with them on site.

We will also be launching this summer a new support offering for developers. This is a very consultative and design review centered offering. It's targeted for solution developers, independent software vendors and it includes both the planning portion that they need help with, the planning the design, planning the testing, planning the training for their end customers.

It includes some application development help, architectural reviews, design reviews, code reviews, tuning and benchmarking help and then there's also an element of responsive technical support and we know that developers work 24 hours a day, just like enterprises do, so this technical support is offered 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including any hot fixes that might be needed in Microsoft development tools to help those applications get out there, be high quality and available to our customer set.

We also know that working with enterprises is all about having a long term relationship and growing a long term relationship is all about customer satisfaction. We're very proud of the satisfaction we have at our Premier support, for example, overall satisfaction in North America is 97 percent and a full 80 percent of those Premier customers surveyed say they are very satisfied with that service.

We also recently fielded a customer satisfaction survey of a selection of our customers in U.S. and in Europe asking them overall about their satisfaction with Microsoft as an enterprise vendor, our product, our sales approach, the knowledge of our account reps, the technical information they get, service and support, our vision and our leadership.

We were very pleased to see that they recognized all the hard work we put into these relationships over the past four or five years because they've rated us comparably with vendors such as IBM and Oracle, who are more traditionally known as enterprise vendors.

We're certainly not satisfied with these kinds of customer satisfaction scores, we want them to be higher and we're committed to continue with improvement of our product, of our services and with our working relationship with businesses.

One of the ways we do this continuous improvement is by staying in touch with customers. We have two rows here down front of our global executive roundtable customers who are spending two and a half days with us. They do that twice a year and there are a variety of these global executive roundtable groups.
It gives us a change to brief them on information that may not be yet available to the public, it gives them a chance to give us some very direct feedback in a small setting and it gives them access to plenty of Microsoft executives and technical people to understand how our products are performing in their environment, so I thank them for being here today.

We also know that there's no single vendor solution inside the enterprise. Every enterprise in a heterogeneous environment and so it takes a whole team of enterprise customers, of solution providers and of service providers to support these enterprises and help them focus on their business.

I want to encourage you at the end of this event to take a look at this partner pavilion. There's some really outstanding demonstrations there and there's three I'd like to highlight for you.

At the Amdahl booth you'll see us demonstrating our mainframe to NT inter-operability solution. It's code named CEDAR. At the NCR booth you'll see NCR demonstrating how to extend the scalability and the functionality of SQL Server and NT with Top-End and at the Tandem booth you'll see a real live customer database of 2 terabytes of data from the Dayton Hudson Corporation running on a 16 node Windows NT cluster. So please go over and take a look at that real work application that Tandem is showing as well.

So it's about making the right investment, focusing on technology, focusing on the product that's allowing our customers to focus on what they want to focus on, their information, their customers and their business.

Thank you very much. At this point in time I'd like to introduce Gunter Toltnic who is the vice-president of corporate marketing for SAP, which means that Hassa's plane did not make it, so Gunter is going to deliver the SAP presentation for us today.