Servers, typically, are not considered sexy. To users, they’re plumbing. To corporate IT, they’re critical parts of the infrastructure. And to VARs, ISVs and resellers, they’re delightful sources of service revenue.
It has also gathered techie media to have a peek at the goodies to come – and some of them looked interesting enough that we quizzed Julius Sinkevicius, group product manager for Windows Server, about what this means to the reseller community.
According to a paper commissioned by Microsoft from IDC, he said, for every dollar spent on Windows Vista and Server 2008, another $18 will be generated in the ecosystem. While we may take that figure with a grain of salt, it still means there are Server 2008 opportunities for resellers, and the company is offering training and programs to help its partners take advantage of them.
The first, he said, is in optimizing system infrastructures. Customer environments can be categorized based on their maturity levels (yup – Microsoft has developed a maturity model), and as they mature, they go through distinct stages. Microsoft offers a partner program around moving customers through these stages.
He feels that virtualization in particular is a big opportunity, since reducing the number of physical servers is close to the hearts of many IT managers these days. Server 2008, with its simplified management and upcoming virtualization technology (now christened Hyper-V), is an ideal host. From the reseller’s point of view, since Hyper-V only runs on 64-bit boxes, helping customers virtualize not only means some nice services revenue, it can also generate hardware sales. VARs will also be able to introduce customers to additional uses of virtualization, such as making it part of a business continuity strategy, to increase those services dollars while nudging their customers up the maturity ladder.
Another potential services stream, Sinkevicius said, is in moving existing workloads to Server 2008 from Linux or VMware. Microsoft even provides a handy tool to convert VMware virtual machines to its own format (and I have no doubt that VMware will return the favour once Hyper-V is shipping).
Yet another interesting feature is actually a bit retro. At the Windows XP launch, Bill Gates ceremonially shut down DOS and made the GUI king. It’s kind of funny to see that today Microsoft has resurrected the supposedly obsolete command line (though not DOS) in the Windows 2008 Server Core. Server Core is a GUI-free installation of Server 2008 – command line only, and without the overhead and vulnerabilities attached to graphical interfaces. It’s designed for use on things like file servers, Active Directory, DNS, print and DHCP servers (it will also host IIS, though it can’t handle .NET, so will only be able to cope with standard ASP, PHP and HTML pages), where maintenance is mostly remote (perhaps by a VAR) and all the system needs to do is chug quietly along.
It’s not sexy, but it can be lucrative.
