PALO ALTO, Calif., May 13, 1999 — Today at the 8th annual TIBCO Strategic Directions conference in Palo Alto, Microsoft President Steve Ballmer explained how Microsoft software can help companies embrace the changing business models of the Internet. Addressing more than 400 CIOs and information technology executives from the financial services and manufacturing industries, Ballmer showed how Microsoft products and technologies can enhance customer relations, foster greater collaboration and improve efficiency for all businesses, providing a framework for adapting to an Internet-centric future.
“Our role as a company is to provide some of the key software that enables these scenarios, whether that’s electronic commerce services, core development platforms, infrastructure or security services,” Ballmer said. “Our goal is to provide a very rich infrastructure – stable, secure and enterprise-ready, for supporting the kinds of applications you want to deploy on the Internet.”
Ballmer noted that companies with a strong e-commerce strategy should connect their internal systems to leverage all company knowledge, then extend those systems to the Web. Using Microsoft products and technologies, such as Office 2000, SQL Server 7.0 and Windows 2000, service-oriented businesses can develop integrated, complete systems to make themselves more accessible to customers and partners.
To this end, TIBCO announced its support for Microsoft’s Windows Distributed InterNet Architecture (DNA), including Windows DNA for Financial Services and DNA for Manufacturing, as well as Microsoft’s new XML-based BizTalk e-commerce framework.
Following his remarks, Ballmer took questions from the audience, clarifying the company’s position on issues such as open source and competition in the software industry, and explaining the logic behind Microsoft’s recent agreements with Nextel and AT & T.
