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Unifying the Microsoft Stack
By Michelle Savage

May 15, 2008 — 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.

“We’re seeing that our customers are trying to simplify their IT infrastructure overall, reduce the diversity of the skill sets needed to support that infrastructure, and simplify the technical tools and development languages they need to coordinate and integrate the different server products within the stack,” said White. “Using Microsoft as a single stack drives that strategy.”

Mark Prout, vice president of engineering for CheckFree, a provider of financial electronic commerce services and products, added that using a pure stack makes support and deployment much easier. “Microsoft is a one-vendor solution,” he said. “You don’t have to cross functional boundaries within a business to troubleshoot. And Microsoft does a good job of integrating their product lines so they have a similar look and feel. It’s easier for systems administrators to maintain pure stacks.”

In addition, experts believe that there is a significant cost savings associated with using the single stack. “In comparison to companies like Oracle, SAP and IBM, the Microsoft stack is cheaper,” said Michael Cote, analyst with RedMonk. “Each of these companies [has] SMB offerings that can compete price-wise. But Microsoft is one of the more affordable options out there, especially when you run the full Microsoft stack. If you’re getting all your software from one vendor, it’s usually a little easier to get it up and running and manage it.”

Prout also pointed out that there is a significant financial incentive to use an all-Microsoft stack. CheckFree undertook a total cost of ownership study, comparing open-source systems with complete Microsoft stacks. “We found that, if you went down the path that’s completely investing in the MS stack and eliminating some of the other third-party applications, there is a financial savings, mainly by being able to eliminate skill sets that were needed for the third-party perspective,” said Prout.

Lingering Challenges
Despite the benefits of a single stack, Microsoft still faces many hurdles in persuading Linux and Unix proponents that the Microsoft stack can compete with Linux. According to Luke Flemmer, founder and managing director at Lab49, there is still a certain amount of institutional bias in many organizations, especially large enterprises, against Microsoft’s server technology.

“Many companies have not used Microsoft servers and consider Microsoft to be more of a desktop-oriented culture,” he said. “On the server side, they look more toward Oracle and IBM and Unix-oriented products. They don’t think Microsoft is ready for prime-time on the server.”

Flemmer added that this is a challenge for forward-thinking IT managers, who want to use Microsoft server products but face internal challenges due to the perception that the Microsoft server stack cannot match the performance, stability and security of Unix and Linux-based solutions. “That’s unfortunate because Microsoft has made many strides in the server market in the last few years and it behooves all organizations to look at Microsoft as a viable back-end solution,” he said.

While many IT shops insist on Linux and Unix deployments, Microsoft is working to increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability. Windows Server is increasingly accepted as a viable solution for running open source applications. SugarCRM, an open-source application provider, said that many of its business deployments occur on Windows Server. In addition, Microsoft is working with SpikeSource, an open-source certification company, to ensure open-source applications work with Windows Server 2008.

According to Perera, non-Microsoft open-source software is no longer the threat it was once perceived to be, especially as Microsoft gives more visibility to its code and enabling interoperability with open-source projects. “There was a time where certainly we had strong competitive pressure on the open-source front,” he said. “But a couple of things have changed. On the one hand, customers asked us to spend more time and energy on the interoperability of our platform with Linux and other non-Windows-based stacks out there. We spent a huge amount of this R&D wave to focus on understanding how we can provide great interoperability with open source environments.”

For example, said Perera, Windows Server 2008 will support Linux-based virtualized environments. On the Web platform, collaboration with Novell will extend Silverlight out to Linux platforms.

“The second thing is we’ve seen a real resurgence in terms of adoption of the Windows Server platform,” said Perera. “This is a result of the level of security and innovation that people are seeing with the Windows Server platform. We certainly keep our eye on the open-source competition but it could now be characterized as a focus around interoperability and continued innovation.”

Due to Microsoft’s effort, it is no longer a necessity to buy the entire Microsoft stack to be productive, said Lab49’s Flemmer. “Increasingly, there’s a lot of interoperability between different vendors and different systems so one can build a system using different components from different vendors,” he added.

However, Flemmer noted that there are certain benefits to using the Microsoft stack. “Microsoft products allow you to build a very powerful and comprehensive system in a very rapid amount of time,” he said. “That’s one of their key differentiators in the market. They deliver products that have a lot of bang for the buck immediately upon implementation.”

Cote believes that the decision to use all-Microsoft products is good for some but not all, as there are important tradeoffs to consider. “If you divide things into Microsoft programmers and the rest of the world, the rest of the world tends to combine stuff together, and you can customize it and get it to do exactly what you want. But there’s always the risk that that power will cost you a lot more money,” he said. “On the other hand, you may pay an affordable price for software that you can’t get to do what you want. You just need to figure out which of those risks is acceptable for you.”

White said that the decision to implement an all-Microsoft stack largely depends on the customer and the starting part. For example, he said, if customers are using Microsoft Windows and Office on their desktop, they are likely to use Microsoft’s collaboration products, such as SharePoint.

“When you have the need to drive down from the desktop into the collaboration area, there are certain prerequisites for the supporting infrastructure,” said White. “Recent SharePoint deployments require Windows Server, for example. Given that starting point, you tend to see a fairly vanilla end-to-end Microsoft stack solution being deployed, even if it’s only for the purpose of messaging collaboration. If conversely you have an organization that may run Windows as their operating system and may have pursued an open-source strategy from the server infrastructure, you’ll see more of a combination of Microsoft and open-source technologies.”

Managing the Stack
When deploying and managing a server stack that uses any or all Microsoft technologies, experts said that there are a few best practices that can enable a successful system.

Flemmer stressed that the key to a successful launch is having skilled Windows systems administrators when deploying and managing the Microsoft stack. “Many companies have systems administrators who have lots of experience managing Linux and Unix environments but don’t really have experience with Windows machines,” he said. “This can make what would have been successful Microsoft implementations flounder because they lacked the expertise needed to make sure that the machines were deployed and produced effectively.”

Pre-planning is critical when deploying pieces of the Windows stack, said Jon Rolls, senior director of product management at ScriptLogic, which provides systems life-cycle management solutions for Microsoft. However, people tend to overlook important questions, such as how it will be installed, integrated, secured, and managed on an ongoing basis. Asking these questions early in the game goes a long way in ensuring a successful deployment, he said.

Rolls said that as Microsoft server products are deployed, it is especially important to use solutions that manage security. To enable this goal, ScriptLogic recently announced three products that combine to analyze, backup and control access on SQL Servers. “SQL servers have grown like crazy recently,” said Rolls. “But a lot of them have been added very quickly without a huge amount of security built around them. Our products enable customers to assess, audit and manage security settings, and to backup and recover data in a fast, secure manner.”

When it comes to maintenance standards, a little thought can go a long way. CheckFree’s success is traced to its pure stack approach, according to Prout. “Keep stacks pure and aggressively mandate a stack standard,” he said. “By using a stack standard, we have very paced and predictable upgrades within those stacks, so we don’t have a lot of churn for our business or development partners where they’re being constantly asked to look at the latest and greatest thing. We take all these Microsoft products and roll them into a stack and we will mature that platform every year or so.”

Prout added that CheckFree invests in both Microsoft stacks and open-system stacks. However, the company keeps its stacks as pure as possible. “On our platforms that run .NET products, they will run Microsoft products from top to bottom, including SQL server, within that stack,” he said. “We do not cross the stack line unless it’s impossible from an engineering perspective not to do so. We do the same with our other partners, including Oracle, Red Hat and IBM.”

Despite the benefits and incentives offered by Microsoft, the most effective deployment strategies are not dictated by vendors. Rather, they involve robust processes and governance programs that ensure that decisions are driven by data, not passion, concluded Prout. “When the business, whether internal or external, approaches us with a problem, we will always try to break that down into what our success criteria is and what we’re trying to solve,” he said. “We apply those criteria across each of our vendors so we give everyone an equal opportunity to compete. Once we look at that, we will choose the best product for that particular business need.”

Related Search Term(s): Microsoft, Windows Server

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