Unifying the Microsoft Stack

By Michelle Savage

May 15, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 6)
For several years, Zone Labs, best known for its nutritional foods and supplements, used a wide variety of systems, including Apache, Java 2 Enterprise Edition, Linux and Tomcat. This hodgepodge of technologies resulted in a lack of automated inventory control, disaster recovery mechanisms and adequate security, making it difficult to support business growth. In 2007, the company switched to an all-Microsoft approach that included Exchange Server 200, Microsoft Dynamics GP, SQL Server 2005 and Windows Server 2003, in an attempt to boost productivity and improve business processes.

“We now have a tightly integrated environment that is well supported and easily managed by a small team, in contrast to a patchwork of unsupported technologies,” said Carl Norloff, senior vice president of technology at Zone Labs.

Zone Labs is one of many companies adopting Microsoft’s pure stack approach, meaning that they are grouping various Microsoft technologies into a single unit and managing them as such. According to Jonathan Perera, platform application manager at Microsoft, more and more companies are choosing to build their server stacks with SQL SharePoint Servers, Windows and other Microsoft products.

The Pure Play
A recent study by Forrester Research revealed that 42 percent of IT organizations were interested in reducing the number of vendors providing them with application software. Many considered a reduction in software vendors to be a “priority” or even a “critical priority.”

According to Phil White, CTO of the WCI Group, a management consultancy, Microsoft is one of the only vendors that offer an end-to-end stack, including core server infrastructure, messaging and collaboration, integration engines, application servers, database servers, and desktop offerings. “Microsoft has a footprint across each of those areas,” he said.

White said that an all-Microsoft stack typically includes products from each of these categories, including Windows Server as an infrastructure platform; Microsoft SQL Server as a database solution; Microsoft SharePoint for Web sites, document management and team collaboration; Microsoft Exchange as an e-mail server; Microsoft Dynamics for ERP and CRM; and Microsoft BizTalk for business process management and integration, in addition to the company’s productivity suite and development tools.

Related Search Term(s): Microsoft, Windows Server

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