Expertise in one or more of these five technology areas will allow partners to profit off high-growth opportunities.If you are a Microsoft ISV, VAR or systems integrator partner, you should be thinking about gaining expertise in five critical technologies. These are the ones that Microsoft is banking on for many future offerings, and these five will play an increasingly bigger role in your own products and services.
1. .NET: It is the essential underpinning of just about everything Microsoft does these days, and if anything could be called the basic infrastructure of Microsoft's programming, .NET is it. The days of the debate between .NET and Java are pretty much over, and while there will always be a place for Java, especially for server-based applications, you will need more .NET developers to handle more sophisticated ways of using .NET in the future. Think of .NET as the connective tissue that will bind together whatever Microsoft does in the future.
2. Live Services and hosted applications: This is also becoming an essential part of the Microsoft software ecosystem. With the announcement of eCRM (customer relationship management) and its very competitive pricing, more of Microsoft's software will be hosted online and offered as a service. As a result, partners will have more opportunities to sell introductory packages and up-sell customers later to migrate these applications to in-house environments.
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"Our software creates services revenue and becomes the collateral for us to attract our own VARs," said Jason Crea, vice president of client and partner engagement for Sitecore USA, a VAR in San Francisco.
The other benefit is the growing familiarity among VARs with hosted applications. Several partners at the Microsoft partner conference in July were talking about hosting Exchange, SharePoint and other applications. If you don't have this capability, it is time you started talking to other Microsoft partners that do and join forces. Part of the hosting business is being able to access and run a data center. Partners that already do this will continue to be in high demand.
3. Exchange: It isn't just e-mail anymore, and so much of what Microsoft is trying to do is based on this set of services. Exchange will handle presence, unified communications, telephony and integrate with many more of Microsoft's newer products, including software that runs on Windows Mobile.
"Outlook is really at the core of so many new things that Microsoft is doing, and messaging will hold them all together," said Eric Raarup, vice president of IT strategy and planning at Inetium, a VAR in Bloomington, Minn.
4. SharePoint: It's no longer just for collaboration, and it actually has become its own platform and part of a new breed of services that will involve indexing, search, shared data and business intelligence types of applications. It could eclipse IBM Lotus Notes in terms of delivering collaboration tools if things go according to plan.
"SharePoint has 85 million seats sold and huge backlog of work for unrealized demand that we can't fill,"
said Jared Spataro, the group product manager for enterprise search at Microsoft. "We have held search up as a key capability. Search, document management and portals are all merging, and with SharePoint you don't want to put in a big middleware software layer."
5. Endpoint security: Microsoft showed off its Forefront security platform and how it is integrating the technologies that it obtained from Whale Communications. This is just the beginning of an entire series of products that will fill out its line of endpoint protection. If you haven't focused on this area, now is the time to get more up to speed. Even though Windows Vista might be the most secure Windows desktop yet, it isn't secure enough.
While there certainly are other technologies that are worth considering, any VAR that can develop expertise in more than one of these five will be able to exploit many high-growth opportunities in the coming year.
David Strom is a technology freelance writer, consultant, blogger and podcaster and can be reached at david@strom.com.
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