With Microsoft in the midst of its biggest transition ever, it was interesting to see the company CEO give the opening keynote speech last week at the Microsoft Worldwide Partners Conference in Boston. He announced products, services, a new partner council, and undying love for integrators selling Microsoft products.

It is pretty clear that Microsoft has lagged the industry when it comes to offering subscription-based hosted services. Ballmer knows it, too.

But like so many other areas in which it has lagged behind, when the giant wakes up, it can bring considerable resources to the table. So it is with hosted services.

One initiative we'll be seeing is a partner-based customization model for Microsoft's CRM Live. What Ballmer says is that Microsoft expects its partners to grow its business in the so-called software-as-a-service segment.

The partner revenue model for this is a long way from the time-honored practice of delivering and installing software to a customer and then charging an annual maintenance fee. With software-as-a-service, partners should expect to see significant revenue from advertising. In addition, there are commissions associated with selling the Windows Live and Office Live services. If you are so inclined, it's also possible to build up your own business of providing hosting for your customers and customizing these services.

To help support its partners, Microsoft rolled out Demo Showcase for People-Ready Business. It aims to help partners improve targeting of their sales and marketing efforts to various specific corporate roles. Similarly, more than a half dozen new customer campaigns should help partners get their marketing efforts more in line with competencies.

With a huge amount of emphasis being placed on search, a Quickstart for Microsoft Search program for partners is being developed. How important is this? Look for Microsoft to create a search partner specialization with its own certification. To that end, about 10 minutes of Ballmer's keynote was given over to a demo of the integrated search capabilities present in Windows Live Search, SharePoint 2007, and, of course, Windows Vista.

It was interesting to hear cheers from the audience as Ballmer announced the anxiously awaited Small Business Server 2003 R2. Available starting in August, the product is being offered in standard and premium editions. The standard edition maintains its $599 pricing. The Premium edition is packaged with SQL Server 2005 Workgroup Edition, with discounted pricing that works out roughly $1,300.

Not everyone is pleased with the decision to include only the Workgroup Edition, rather than the full-blown SQL Server, but Microsoft is taking the position that small businesses don't need the larger product nor the support issues that come with it. It will be interesting to see how this works out.

In the coming months, we'll begin to see the programs and services that were alluded to throughout the three-day conclave. As details become better known, we'll be sure to look at them with a critical eye and integrator-centric point of view.

ITworld.com

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