14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has identified no less than five problem areas for branch office and mid-market IT related to Windows Server, and is asking for input from customers. Mike van de Merwe and Manisha Patel are working together in an attempt to harvest feedback from businesses on the technology, business, and environmental challenges they are facing.
According to the duo, the Redmond company is interested in limitations that customers are seeing around Branch Office and/or Mid-Sized business IT infrastructures management.
“From our research we have identified 5 areas where our customers have expressed increased concerns:
• Enabling an increasingly mobile workforce
• Working within the constraints of tightening IT budgets
• Disaster recovery and data backup planning
• Providing secure and highly available server operating systems
• Reducing hardware costs and providing more, easily managed, services.”
Mike van de Merwe –has been with Microsoft for over a decade, and his focus in the Windows Server organization is on Mid-Market customers.
Similarly, Manisha Patel’s role with the Windows Server organization is to listen to the voice of the Branch Office customers.
“We want to help you solve these challenges, but first we want to know if you agree with our initial findings. Over the next several months we will be collecting your feedback and proposing solutions to help solve these challenges.
“We will also highlight other ideas and solutions that are geared towards helping those managing Branch and Mid-Market IT infrastructures,” the two said.
There’s no telling whether this feedback will have any impact on the development of Windows Server 8, the successor of Windows Server 2008 R2, which is being built in parallel with the Windows 8 client.
According to third-party sources, Windows 8 is going to reach Milestone 3 in March 2011, and if the two operating systems are indeed joined at the hip, Windows Server 8 is also bound to hit M3 soon.