14 DAY TRIAL // When it comes down to the three-horse race of the operating systems delivered by Microsoft, Apple and the open source community, Windows has the upper hand. Owning in excess of 90% of the operating system market, and estimated to surpass the 1 billion install base milestone by mid 2008, Windows has a very strong advantage over Mac OS X and Linux. And in the same manner in which Apple's products inherently benefit from the brand value and the marketing strategies associated with the Cupertino-based hardware company, and since Linux has the loyal support of the open source community, Windows is benefiting from the partner ecosystem that Microsoft has been continually building. And of course that, in this context, Windows is by no means the sole product from the Redmond company to take advantage of the in excess of 400,000 Microsoft partners.
"There are more than 400,000 partners in the Microsoft ecosystem. We have about 8,000 managed partners in the enterprise that have a partner account manager that works with them to build a joint partner business plan. Then we have approximately 90 alliances that we differentiate from managed partners because of their scale. We align with alliance partners more deeply and broadly. We commit with them on a broader set of solutions, and we're able to engage with them across more customer types and geographies", revealed Peter Boit, Vice President, Enterprise Partner Sales.
But although Windows is one of Microsoft's flagship products along with the Office System, but undoubtedly the main cash cow, the company has been working on diversifying its business pillars. In this sense, focus has been placed on delivering solutions to increasingly tailor fit the corporate environment. Boit revealed that Microsoft's partners will have ample opportunity to leverage the company's new strategy direction, outside of the traditional markets where it already has a strong benefit.
"We're really focused on three main areas of enterprise opportunity. The first is business applications, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and other related areas. The second is the platform, having the tools and products associated with helping developers and IT create the best applications, whether they're custom built or other packaged applications that ride on top of our platform. And the last is infrastructure, both in terms of business productivity across the enterprise, as well as our core infrastructure products such as Windows Server, and systems management and security technologies", Boit added.