There's nothing Microsoft seems to relish more than a new field of battle, especially when the winner's spoils are vast and lucrative. At the moment, many observers hear the rumble of heavy artillery approaching the relatively Microsoft-free zone of the large enterprise.
Until recently, the software giant has hovered at the edges of this market only, having had a tough time when it discovered it couldn't supply the sort of service support demanded by huge companies, say analysts. Bill Gates and Co may be the undisputed lords of the desktop but the enterprise realm remained unimpressed.
Large enterprises those with what the IT industry calls, in its vaguely NASA-ish way, "mission critical" applications cannot tolerate any down-time and require lightning service. They expect large systems companies like IBM, Digital Equipment Corporation and Unisys to understand and quickly troubleshoot the IT problems unique to big accounts.
Nonetheless, with typical aplomb Microsoft has laboured over one of the largest projects a technology company can undertake the design of a new operating system (the OS controls the operations of a computer). And, an operating system which it hopes to position in business. Windows NT, younger brother to the Windows desktop OS with which PC users are familiar, has already made inroads into small and medium enterprises, running on workstations and on small servers. Many company IT managers like NT because it has many of the powerful features of far more expensive operating systems like Unix and is easier to manage and integrates smoothly with company desktops running Windows 95. Because of this, Windows NT Server is gaining market share at the expense of Novell Netware, low-end Unix "flavours", and IBM OS/2.
Microsoft wants to drive it into the large enterprise market, but until recently that looked unlikely. Studies showed NT was weak just where enterprises needed strength: scalability, security, and many areas of performance. It's also a fairly young OS, launched only in the early 1990s. The IT industry's general consensus is that an OS takes a decade to reach stable maturity.
"NT is maturing, but it's maturing slowly," said analyst Mr Laurent Lachal of London software industry analysts Ovum. Thus the recent announcement that the next release of NT, 5.0, has been delayed will give some comfort to Microsoft's large enterprise competitors, which can better prepare a counter-offensive. NT 5.0 should fill some of the performance gaps of 4.0, making NT a more compelling proposition for big businesses.
The delay also gives breathing space to Microsoft's nemesis, Sun Microsystems' programming language, Java. While still riddled with problems, Java's great promise is that it makes operating systems irrelevant applications written in Java would run anywhere. "At the end of the day, the decision [to go with a particular OS] is made based on what type of applications run on that particular architecture," said Mr Lachal. Java would eliminate that complication.
In the meantime, Microsoft is finding other ways of inveigling NT into large enterprises. One way is to promote it as an OS that likes company. If enterprises cluster servers, says Microsoft, NT gains in strength and can handle many enterprise tasks. The codename for the upcoming developer's release of NT 5.0 is Wolfpack a reflection of this focus on clustering.
Microsoft's other battle tactic is to form strategic partnerships with large systems companies which can supply the expertise Microsoft lacks in certain products and services. Thus, competitors like Hewlett-Packard and DEC, which produce their own versions of Unix and the hardware they run on, have also become Microsoft's bed-partners.
The latest to squeeze in is Unisys, a company better known for its mainframe and mid-range computing products. Unisys will provide service expertise certifying 2,000 technicians to offer NT enterprise support and "middleware" (software which sits between the operating system and an end-user's software application) to boost NT's performance in its areas of enterprise weakness. Unisys's strength is in vertical markets like finance (Unisys servers run Nasdaq, for example). Microsoft expects the Unisys partnership to open doors for NT into very large enterprise markets like government agencies, banks, and insurance companies.
Most industry predictions are for a massive swing to NT over the next decade it is far cheaper than Unix (NT workstations average around $3,000 [£2,041] while Unix workstations push $18,000 [£12,244]). Developers are also moving swiftly to provide applications.
The European market has taken far more slowly to NT, said Mr Lachal. Nonetheless, the interest is there and is increasing, said Mr Kevin Haverty, sales manager for Dublin computer consultants Mentec. "A very sizeable portion of the tenders coming out have NT as a prerequisite," he said. He thinks NT is ideal for the Irish marketplace, since companies are smaller.
Irish IT managers voiced a mixed response. Standard Life's Dublin office uses Novell Netware. "I don't feel there's any great business benefits to moving to NT," said Mr Ray McNamara, systems and technical support manager. Standard Life has 3,300 desktop systems in Britain which will roll out the workstation version of NT next spring, he says, but servers will stay with upgrades of Netware. However, he adds that longer-term, they may well shift to NT.
The entire Irish Government currently runs on Netware as well, said Mr Eamonn Laird, IT manager at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. But NT is making steady advances in some areas. "We're moving Lotus Notes onto NT servers and our mail server is on NT as well," he said.
File and print applications will stay on Netware, mainly because he finds NT is too resourcehungry.
AIB has servers running IBM's OS/2 and desktops on Windows 3.X, but Mr Jim Breen, head of computing support, noted: "We have a pilot of Windows NT for workstations under way in the head office and would possibly be rolling it out, but we're not yet committed."
Microsoft has the money to bang the drum loudly for NT, just as it did for Windows 95. But, said Mentec's Mr Haverty: "There's still a lot of work to be done in terms of convincing big companies."
Many analysts feel Unix has plenty of muscle and that Java may yet prove a formidable adversary. "It's very good to have an alternative to NT," said Mr Lachal. But Microsoft's staying power may win the day.
"One of the key elements of trust with NT is the belief that eventually, Microsoft will get it right," said Mr Lachal.
