This is James Governor at RedMonk TV. We're in Barcelona with Microsoft and this is Carl Koken, one of the directors of strategic alliances at the firm, particularly in and around the management software area. So what exactly does a director of strategic alliances do, Carl? So we manage the alliances and partnerships with both industry standards bodies as well as a bunch of industry or technology companies like HP, Dell, IBM, as well as software vendors like Citrix and chip vendors like Intel and AMD. So we work with all of those to try and make sure that our platform is the most manageable platform in the market as well as ensuring that they're able to build on top of our management platform and management tools to create some added value. What I'm talking about developers, it's like trying to herd cats or, I mean, it sounds to me that you'd be trying to corral a bunch of elephants, you know, with a mouse in the room somewhere. They're all pushing and pulling in different directions and how do you manage that at such scale? I mean, these are all huge companies that do not turn on a dime. How do you manage that process? So I think there's two different pieces to it. One is the platform and the products that we've developed to make sure that those are extensible, that they can add value to them, they can see that if they do add value, it's good for their business. But the other side of it is also working with the standards bodies to ensure that we're able to make sure that we're working in a collaborative process. And then even outside of the standards bodies, we're hoping to build up a community, like we launched here on Monday, where the System Center Partner Program or Alliance Program, to be able to say, okay, here's how these folks can get access to information about how to build on top of our platform, how to add value to our management solutions, and then also how to communicate that information over to our customers and to our field and our partners. So this is a community kind of portal, community platform? So initially it's just a portal. So we're starting off relatively basic and hoping to build off of that. But starting off as a portal where the information, so we've got about 20 some odd partners already in the Alliance Program now, where their information is available there now. We also consolidated a bunch of the information that was spread out all across Microsoft.com and other sources.
2:06Things were hard to find on Microsoft.com? Not at all. Not at all. Everything was real easy, but just, you know, we just wanted to make it a little easier. So yeah, so we try to consolidate all that in one place. So someone that wants to build a dynamic configuration management pack can find the information to do that, as well as be able to find the information to build a management pack or a connector, or be able to work with PowerShell. So be able to see all the information and also understand some of the standards that we're working with. And then also for our partners, be able to provide the information on what they did. So when Dell builds a management pack, or Dell builds the OSD pack, that information is available on our portal. And they're willing to share that IP? Not necessarily IP, but at least be able to share the information about what they've developed and give the customer access to that. So when someone builds a management pack, the whole intent for a Dell or an HP or an Intel, when they build a management pack or even a Citrix, is to make sure that their product is well managed when a customer chooses system center. And so what they want to make sure of is that that solution is easily available to that customer. And then also the information is easily available, both to the customer as well as to our field. So when our folks go out and talk to our partners and our field go out and talk to our customers, they're able to articulate what it is that that customer can do to manage their entire environment. Doesn't that bother the salespeople? It's like, wait, wait, if the customer already knows what the information is, what am I going to do? What am I going to put down in front of them? So for a lot of the sales guys, it's actually a very big benefit to them, because that way they don't have to keep in their head every single partner and what each partner is doing. And they can focus in on how is this solution going to solve your problem? How do I help you to implement the infrastructure optimization model to move you from basic to standard or rational? How do we get you to move forward so you can have a better management platform and better handle on your environment? So the community thing, it's not just because you like to wear sandals and so on. You're trying to make money with this? Obviously, it's not a direct revenue generator, but how do you see the relationship between the community efforts and how are we going to make a buck? For us, we've always seen that System Center is a platform. That what we're developing
4:08we do a great job on managing Microsoft platform, Microsoft products, but we want to leverage our partners to be able to provide a solution that enables us to manage non-Microsoft products: SAP, Oracle's database, other non-Microsoft operating systems, Linux. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Are there other ones? Yeah, really. And we have a partner like Nworks that provides a VMware management platform. So if a customer chooses a system center, you want them to be able to manage that entire environment because as a system management tool, and you've been in the industry as long as I have, you've got to be able to manage that heterogeneous environment. You don't want to tell everybody how old you are, huh? Come on. I'm trying to say I've only been here a couple of years, so we don't really know what's going on. Yeah, absolutely. But that's the idea. At the end of the day, if we're able to provide a solution to the customer where they can manage that entire environment, they're going to buy more licenses of our product and also be much happier with the total cost of ownership of the Windows environment that they've purchased. So if we're successful, they see that the solution we delivered is certainly best agreed on Windows and Microsoft, but then also allows us to manage the rest of their environment just as well through these partnerships. And for us, we certainly understand we don't know SAP. We don't know SAP as well as other companies know SAP. Right. We don't know Oracle as well as, say, Quest knows Oracle. So let's go and work with those folks that really know about how to manage that application or that database or that platform and have them go and create the knowledge necessary to do it. That definitely is important. I mean, managing a database is not something that you can really do as a kind of a, well, we kind of manage it. Right. We can kind of optimize it. Right. You either do or you don't in some respects. And even we have that philosophy internally as well. So we know in our division how to build a management platform. That doesn't mean we know how to manage SQL Server. The SQL Server group knows how to manage SQL Server. So when we think about this platform, it's both for our internal partners as well as our external partners. So that enables us to be able to say, okay, SQL Server group, you build the SQL Server management pack. You build the DCM pack. You build the components and the knowledge necessary because you built the product. You build the product. You know it best if you've got Exchange. And that's why when we talk about us being best of breed in the Windows environment, it's not because we know in the management group how to manage Windows really well.
6:17It's because the Windows group knows how to manage Windows really well. It's because the Exchange group knows how to manage Exchange really well. And so we just take that philosophy externally. It's okay. You know how to manage Oracle. You have the domain expertise. You go do it. Hewlett Packard, Dell, Intel, you know how to manage your platforms really well. AMD, you know how to manage your platform really well. You build the management pack. You build the components, the update catalogs, the things that are necessary to add that knowledge into the solution so that the customer is able to have a best managed environment. One sort of question that I would have, having spoken to Jeffrey Snober who is the architect of PowerShell, this very interesting environment. Now at Microsoft there were certain, because of the common engineering criteria, when one of the businesses goes and builds the management packs and so on, they have to do it within common criteria which therefore makes it work effectively on the platform. My question would be how does that work in terms of external companies? You can't go to one of those and say you've got to build on PowerShell. Can you? I mean can you see that perhaps some partners would take on more of those engineering criteria or is that really just inside basis? So for us it's really been a lot of partners who are looking at this as they think of or look at the common engineering criteria as kind of best practices. And so some of them are adopting that but really at the end of the day they're going to look at the technologies we provide and figure out what's the best way for them to manage their product and is using some of the things that we provided the way to do it or are there other mechanisms? So for example with F5 they have non-Windows appliances. So they have load balancers, they have WAN optimizers and security devices. Those are all running non-Windows operating systems. They partnered with us to build a management appliance based on operations manager that is going to enable them to manage all of those products. And they're doing a couple different things. One is they've already got an API on those boxes to access the management information. Yes. So they're going to go and use that API to do so. But then to automate it they're going to use PowerShell. Interesting. So what we're seeing is it depends upon the task they're trying to accomplish and the interfaces they've got available what steps they're going to take moving forward.
8:18All we can do is provide the platform and make sure that it's easy to use for them and easy for them to leverage and powerful enough to enable them to do their job. Yeah, I think we're probably ready to call it a wrap. This will make a nice little episode of Red Monk TV. So thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks for giving us the time. Appreciate it. Cheers.