Special Report
System Management News, a twice-monthly newspaper for managers responsible for data centers, IT operations and systems administration, interviews WCI's Phil White about the benefits of adopting a pure Microsoft stack.
The Pure Play
A recent study by Forrester Research revealed that 42 percent of IT organizations were interested in reducing the number of vendors providing them with application software. Many considered a reduction in software vendors to be a “priority” or even a “critical priority.”
According to Phil White, CTO of the WCI Group, a management consultancy, Microsoft is one of the only vendors that offer an end-to-end stack, including core server infrastructure, messaging and collaboration, integration engines, application servers, database servers, and desktop offerings. “Microsoft has a footprint across each of those areas,” he said.
White said that an all-Microsoft stack typically includes products from each of these categories, including Windows Server as an infrastructure platform; Microsoft SQL Server as a database solution; Microsoft SharePoint for Web sites, document management and team collaboration; Microsoft Exchange as an e-mail server; Microsoft Dynamics for ERP and CRM; and Microsoft BizTalk for business process management and integration, in addition to the company’s productivity suite and development tools.
“We’re seeing that our customers are trying to simplify their IT infrastructure overall, reduce the diversity of the skill sets needed to support that infrastructure, and simplify the technical tools and development languages they need to coordinate and integrate the different server products within the stack,” said White. “Using Microsoft as a single stack drives that strategy.”
Published by System Management News - 15 May 2008
The full report is available at:
http://www.sysmannews.com/content/article.aspx?ArticleID=32184