KEY POINTS:
Say what you like about Microsoft, but no one can accuse the software giant of being timid when it launches new products.
Many in the local business IT community are probably still recovering from last month's "Launchwave 08" hoopla, a three-city show to usher in three new Microsoft software packages which will become big revenue generators over the next few years.
Around 2000 IT types turned out to events in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch to launch the new offerings: the Windows Server 2008 operating system, software development tool Visual Studio 2008, and database software package SQL Server 2008.
Out on the street, Microsoft's public profile is tied to its dominance of the PC operating-systems market through Windows XP and Vista, and through its widely-used Office suite of productivity tools including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.
But Microsoft is also a dominant force back in the fluro-tubed world of the corporate IT department. It has about a two-thirds share of the global server operating system market, which is why the launch of its latest iteration - Windows Server 2008 - attracted the crowds.
One local business to make an early move to upgrade some of its servers from the previous 2003 version is engineering consultancy Tonkin & Taylor, headquartered in Auckland and with branch offices around the country and overseas.
Engineers regularly work with high resolution aerial photographs, and while your typical holiday snap might take up a megabyte of storage, the images Tonkin & Taylor's staff deal with can be 1000 times larger, at a gigabyte each.
These massive files need to be backed up and made available to the firm's remote offices, and this is where Windows Server 2008 has proved to be a good investment, says Tonkin & Taylor IT operations manager, Catherine Byrne.
A feature in the new software, called distributed file server replication, has shaved about 100 hours a month off the time branch office staff need to spend dealing with backing-up data, Byrne says.
Microsoft New Zealand's general manager Kevin Ackhurst says one of the enhancements within Server 2008 sparking the most interest from the local IT community is its "virtualisation" capabilities.
Virtualisation allows a single server to run multiple programs, making more efficient use of an organisation's computing resources. Microsoft is making a major push into the burgeoning and lucrative virtualisation market with a technology it calls Hyper-V, an early version of which is now shipping with Server 2008.
Ullrich Loeffler, an Auckland-based software-sector analyst with IT research firm IDC, says Microsoft certainly has the ability to make an impact on the virtualisation market. That market is currently dominated by US company VMware, which had a spectacularly successful sharemarket float last year.
Ackhurst says Server 2008 and the other products promoted through Launchwave 08 are part of a comprehensive platform of tools Microsoft can supply to local companies wanting to develop online services to grow their businesses.
"If you look at the prevalence of online commerce [in New Zealand] versus online commerce in other developed nations, there's a greater take-up in other countries than what you typically have here.
"The elements associated with security, reliability and the ability to provide great web pages based on database on this server platform [SQL Server 2008] developed with the Visual Studio platform are things that people seem very happy with," he says.
"My expectation is that as we see innovative companies seeking to provide new Web 2.0-type business models, those organisations, and more like them, will be established using this platform."
Ackhurst, a veteran of Microsoft's international operations who took up the local role late last year, says on top of simply providing the IT tools, his company needed to take more of a lead in showing businesses how to best use them.
"We live in a country that has a lot of really innovative people, and those innovative people are going to find interesting things to do with this stuff.
"But whilst that will happen, you've also got to foster a lot of that innovation. The role companies like ours should take is to actually give people ideas about the things that they could be doing."
He said Microsoft's strategy on how it could best foster innovation in New Zealand was evolving, and he planned to launch specific initiatives later in the year.
