Microsoft says

Mar 30, 2009 15:44 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has not been shy of applauding its products as the lifebuoy that can keep businesses afloat in the global economic tsunami, provided that the necessary technology investments are met. When it comes down to squeezing IT dollars, Bob Muglia, president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, opined that the decreasing IT spendings should not result in services getting squashed. According to Muglia, Microsoft's way of helping out is pouring money into the evolution of its Windows server operating systems, virtualization technologies, security solutions and also cloud computing. The Windows Server boss indicated that, in the end, fighting the economic crisis would mean leveraging more innovation, but also getting additional value with existing IT infrastructures.

“Rather than decreasing their IT spend in challenging times, some companies are choosing to recalibrate their budgets and invest in technical solutions that deliver savings over the long run,” Muglia explained. “For example, many of our customers that have virtualized their datacenters are already seeing significant savings resulting from server consolidation, faster resource deployment and IT process automation.”

Muglia stressed that the number-one money server was virtualization technology. One illustrative example is the Slough Borough Council, which converted physical servers to virtual machines and managed to save $148,000 upfront on hardware expenses, while also reducing server deployment costs by $23,700 per year.

At the same time, Muglia emphasized that it was not all about virtualization. However, virtualization technology does spark new business strategies, including catalyzing the move into the Cloud, as opposed to continuing to run traditional on-premise solutions. “A business might move an application that’s well-suited for the cloud, such as e-mail, from their datacenter to a hosted cloud service, but they may keep more sensitive applications, such as their payroll system, on-premises,” Muglia added.

Microsoft is cooking a range of new solutions on the server-side, which it applauds as cost-effective ahead of anything else, but also scalable, being able to be tailored to small businesses as well as large corporations. The Redmond company is working to finalize Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft Forefront, code-named “Stirling,” Identity Lifecycle Manager “2,” as well as Visual Studio 2010 and the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.