Speech Transcript – Paul Flessner, Tech-Ed 2001

Tech Ed 2001
Remarks by Paul Flessner
June 18, 2001

PAUL FLESSNER: Good morning. On behalf of all of Microsoft, welcome to Tech Ed 2001. The first thing I want to do is thank each and every one of you for coming out today and doing the travel and coming to Atlanta to learn more about Microsoft and our .NET initiative. We very much appreciate the fact that you’d take time away from your work, and we worked hard to make this show packed full of information about our new products and our new services in support of that strategy, and we want to make sure you can go back and go right to work on building new and improved applications for your businesses and customers.

So I want to do a couple of things this morning. First, I want to talk to you about Web Services. Now, what the heck is a Web Service? Why should I care about a Web Service? What does it mean to my business? How can it help me?

I was an application developer for 13 years before I came to Microsoft, and I would be very excited about Web Services, and I’m going to share that excitement with you today and hopefully get you excited about it as well.

I’m also going to talk to you about the .NET enterprise servers, why I believe they’re the best platform to deploy Web Services, why we work hard on those servers every day to make them a great platform, and I’m going to try to get you a few data points that you may not have known previously.

We’re also going to have a little fun. We’re going to bring out some customers to talk about great applications that they’ve built, and we’re going to do some demos and we’re going to launch a couple of products.

So with that, let’s get started.

So, I had mentioned before that I was in IT for about 13 years before I came to Microsoft, and I think everybody in IT kind of has this idea that at some point they’re going to think, “Man, I’ve done it.” They’re going to be able to take a slide that looks something like this. They’re going to storm into the CEO’s office and they’re going to say, “Hey, look; man, we’ve got it. We’re in great shape. We’re completely connected with our customers. We’ve got complete Web presence. All our products are available online. Customers can search our site. They can find out anything about our products. We can completely get in touch with our customers through our CRM system. We’ve got complete knowledge of what they’re doing, their demand. We’ve got good marketing information on them. Our partners, a completely integrated supply chain. We feel great. We have very low inventory. We can do available to promise for our customers; complete supply chain integration.” The employee is very happy, absolutely connected, all benefits online, life couldn’t be better.

All is built on top of a common applications infrastructure, single sign-on, authentication, personalization, all on a data model; what more can I do? Veni, vidi, vici: I came, I saw, I conquered, big cigar; I need a big raise. I’m out of here.

So that doesn’t really happen. It’s a very complex world, as we know, and it’s difficult to get all this stuff to work together.

So even though we’d all like to have that conversation, our world looks more and more like this. You’ve got different applications built by different vendors, ostensibly built by your own internal IT. Some of these systems weren’t really built with a lot of extensibility in mind. You know, your customer service system may be a Siebel system, the supply chain I2 or Manugistics, ERP and finance may be from SAP and human resources may be from PeopleSoft. So systems are all kind of a system unto themselves. They have their own data model and they maybe have some APIs and many of them do, but overall they can be kind of fragile to get hooked up and connected, and that can lead to kind of frustrating experiences to get those systems extended.

So let’s talk about what a Web Service is and how it can help. Web Services are about making your code more available. Every developer is simple: All a developer wants is to write some good code and let it be used by lots and lots of customers. You want it to have a good life, lots of people using it, a lot of extensibility.

So there are some fundamental things to a Web Service that kind of make it have those characteristics. It’s got to be discoverable. It’s got to be self-describing and it’s got to be programmable.

Discoverable: You’ve got to be able to find it. You can’t just have a service available that nobody can find. So we’re going to talk a little bit more about some of the protocols that help this happen, but you’ve got to be able to go out and discover the thing and be able to use it.

Self-describing: Once I find it, I have to know how to program to it. It needs to be able to tell me what kind of schema it has. It needs to be able to tell me what kind of parameters I need to patch it.

And programmable: It’s got to do something. When I pass it that schema and I when I pass it those parameters, I need it to do some work and give me something back. That’s a key component of what it means to be a Web Service.

Accessible via Internet protocols: It doesn’t help if this stuff all doesn’t plug together. It’s all got to be simple. It’s got to be broad-based. It’s got to be very much available in a ubiquitous way or else it doesn’t plug together and it doesn’t work.

You’ve got to be able to aggregate a Web Service, so lots of services can come together and work together to perform an application. It’s kind of different than maybe the way we think about applications in the past, but the ability to aggregate is also a key concept.

Loosely coupled for scalability: Some of the concepts that I’ve discussed already may be familiar to you if you’ve ever done any work on COM or COM+. That’s not a surprise, but COM and COM+ are great for building components on a single machine in process, but when you want to run across the Internet or scale to thousands and thousands of users, loosely coupled is a superior model and allows you that kind of flexibility, redundancy and scale.

And I think probably one of the most important aspects is that Web Services don’t discriminate. They don’t care what kind of operating system sends it the message. They don’t care what kind of language was used to build that message. They don’t care what kind of programming model it was. This is a huge advantage. The world that you live in, the world that your customers live in, the world that your business partners live in is a heterogeneous world, and being able to connect to all those and have a Web Service just take a message, take those parameters, process it and give it back and not really worry about what did it frees you up from a whole variety of things. You can then build your Web Services and deploy them on the platform that meets your business needs and not have to worry about the programming environment of the other partner.

Web Services were designed by requirements from you. All of you came to us over and over again and said, “Look, I love what you’re doing, but I really need to think about my code investment. I really need to have you think about a 10-year lifetime for this code. We really can’t be rewriting our code every three to five years. It’s just too hard and too expensive.”

So the design point for an XML Web Service came from you, the customer. Microsoft has driven this initiative based on your requirements and we very much appreciate it and we’re excited about it going forward.

I said that in order for it to be a Web Service it has to have Internet protocols or open protocols. We’ve worked extremely hard with a lot of our competitors and the W3C to get these standards into the market. XML itself just doesn’t do it. It’s a great protocol — text, tag; you can get a schema, you can traverse it — but that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Many of you may have worked with ANSI and EDI in the past — ANSI X12 maybe, and you realize that those are pretty complex transactions and you need to be able to not just understand what ANSI X12 spec is, but also what the other guy is sending you.

So we talked about how to publish and find services. UDDI is a spec that we put into the market working with IBM and Ariba and Commerce One and a bunch of others; over 200 other companies worked together to get this specification out, and I believe it has been submitted to the W3C.

You’ve also got to have this ability to describe, as I talked about before. WSCL is another spec that we’ve submitted to the W3C, so that customers can stand out and we can describe the schema and so that we’ll absolutely be able to know what a given Web Service can do; the interactions from SOAP, the actual wire protocol, the header describes what this message needs to do; XML, of course, and then HTTP over the wire.

So helping to achieve this dream where you go in and conquer the CEO and tell him that your business is now completely ready to expand in the next coming years and beyond, you can think about it in terms of wrapping your existing applications. And don’t think about this in terms of just wrapping the entire application; think about going forward you can also write individual components of your application that may need to be extended and then aggregate those components into another application, which may then aggregate out into other applications. You want to think about the world a little differently as you start to build this.

But exposing each of your applications as a service actually has some pretty dramatic effect. The first one I want to talk about is the customer Dollar Rental Car. Dollar Rental Car was approached by Southwest Airlines, and they said, “Look, we want to build a complete travel site. We’re going to offer airline reservations, certainly. We also want to offer car rentals and hotel reservation systems. And we’d like to hook that right into our Web site. We don’t want to have people jumping off to go off to your Web site to do that.”

So they looked at that and they decided, “Okay, we’ll give this a try,” but the problem was Southwest Airlines was running Sun Corba and the Dollar Rental Car reservation system was Alpha and VMS.

So what they thought they would do is a socket implementation. They’d put it together talking sockets over the Internet. And they took a look at this and they thought it was going to take them about eight months, and the guys that had just been looking at this said, “That’s too long. We’re going to miss the window of opportunity.”

And it just so happens that somebody from Dollar Rental Car had just returned from the Microsoft PDC and had heard about SOAP and the SOAP toolkit and what we were doing with Web Services.

So as an alternative, they spec’ed out what it would take to take the socket’s input from the Southwest site, wrap that in a COM object utilizing SOAP and pass that over to the other COM objects that were already talking to the back-end reservation system at Dollar. And that is what they ended up doing. They ended up getting it done in two months and it’s had a huge impact. They saved six months of development in putting this thing together. The site is on track to generate $10 million of incremental revenue for Dollar this year. And it’s a higher profit opportunity for them because they don’t have to pay these EDS fees, which is a big aggregator, such as Galileo and Sable.

They’re currently now thinking about extending out the rest of their Web to mobile devices and other architectures utilizing the same Web Services, so they’re very excited about it and it’s had a great effect on their business.

Another company that’s joining us here today is a company called (E-Sky) and they’ve got some exciting things that they want to talk about and what they have done with Web Services. And to do that, I’m going to introduce the CEO and chairman of E-Sky, Mr. Jay “Smoke” Wallins. Smoke, how are doing?

(Applause.)

JAY “SMOKE” WALLINS: Good. Good, Paul.

PAUL FLESSNER: Well, tell us about E-Sky, Smoke.

JAY “SMOKE” WALLINS: Well, E-Sky is the dominant Web Service provider to the global drinks industry. What we’re doing is connecting up the brand owners like Allied Domecq, the owner of Kahlua, to the distributors in their different channels to the retailers in bars and restaurants where many of you will be later tonight.

PAUL FLESSNER: So Smoke’s got that whole thing worked out.

JAY “SMOKE” WALLINS: To give you an idea of the difficulty of this task, before I get into how we’re using the Microsoft services technologies to do it, let me set up the industry for a second. The global drinks industry is quite complex and that’s driven in large measure by the regulatory history. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that we may be the only industry that you’ll hear about that was created by a constitutional amendment. In 1933 when Prohibition was repealed, they created the three-tier system, which gave each state the right to regulate beverage alcohol as they so chose. Well, that created a very fragmented and complex mandated three-tier system.

So what does that mean to a typical restaurant or bar? Well, if you’re the Fridays here in Atlanta, you have to go to order all of your beverages from many different vendors. For wine and spirits you have to go to the Anheuser Busch distributor, the Miller distributor and so on and so forth. And it’s a very time consuming and complex process.

As you can imagine, the 550,000 retail outlets that are out there that sell beverage alcohol in the U.S., many of them, some of are chains, but many of them are very small businesses with limited technology.

What E-Sky is doing is gathering up various services from the distributors, whether it’s product catalogues, pricing catalogues, inventory availability and bundling them together and providing a single service to a retail vendor, a retail outlet all of the services they need to better manage their business.

On the back end it’s very similar. You’d be surprised that the distributors also have a very manual back-based system, where they’re sending orders to Segram or Allied Domecq on paper or calling up to put their orders in, and again very similarly we’re giving a window into the various product catalogues and pricing and availability and ship notice from the brand owners, who all have very different systems. And we are that map with all the complex guides out there with different systems. There are no two that are quite alike. And we provide it all in one bundled services offering.

So now we’ll talk for a second about how we’re using the Microsoft .NET strategy to accomplish this. We believe very strongly that this is the next generation of where services are going and it is the ideal way to provide lots of different services from lots of companies in one place. And so we bet early on, as we were talking last night, very early on, probably bet the company that this was the direction to go and it’s paying off today, I’m happy to say.

Today, we have Windows 2000 as our base platform. The BizTalk Server is active and we’re today conducting business with several of the leading drinks companies around the world and it’s working quite effectively. It’s matching up lots of disparate systems into central place.

PAUL FLESSNER: Excellent.

JAY “SMOKE” WALLINS: I guess there are a couple of things that really we’re excited about. One, as always, the Microsoft products integrate with each other very well. That doesn’t necessarily solve my problem with a distributor or a brand owner, because I still have to deal with the 60,000 SKUs without coming numbering systems, and we’re working very hard to create XML standards within the industry. But it does help us internally.

We’re also working with IBM’s Microsoft Global Practice to help implement the solution, and we’re very excited with the prospect.

PAUL FLESSNER: Excellent. Well, thanks a lot, Smoke. We appreciate it. Good luck with those applications.

JAY “SMOKE” WALLINS: Thanks, Paul. Nice to be here.

(Applause.)

PAUL FLESSNER: So that was another example of how that business is taking heterogeneous systems on both sides actually, you know, the sell side and the buy side and hooking them together. The beverage industry is kind of an antiquated set of systems, a lot of fax machines and dial-up models, and E-Sky has done a lot to really plug those customers together and has got a very promising future.

The .NET platform is a very broad platform. It takes a lot to be able to tie together all the investments that the companies that you work for and many others have made over the years. We’ve got lots of server infrastructure. We’ve got this concept of Web Services that we want to foster, all the Internet properties that are out there today, and we’ve got a rich diverse set of clients that are changing every day, some well connected, some occasionally connected and some disconnected. So it’s a very broad environment that Microsoft .NET is trying to pull together.

Speaking of frameworks, I’d just mention on the left here we talk about tools. We’re working hard, and Bill tomorrow is going to talk a lot about the new tools that we’ve put together to really help pull together the .NET initiative, the .NET framework to help in a large way in terms of making that easy.

And on the right side of the slide, you see a set of experiences that Microsoft will put together and lots of customers will put together to express the server applications, the Web Services and express those out to the clients.

This isn’t something that we’re just advocating you to do. This is something that we’re implementing deeply at Microsoft. And you’ve probably heard about codedname HailStorm and some of the foundation services that Microsoft is putting together. This is the exact architecture that we’re taking in our own business, in our own Internet properties — MSN and others, bCentral — to get our services out into the marketplace as well.

So now I’m going to talk for a few more minutes about our servers. That’s my job at Microsoft, making those servers work well, making them a great platform to deploy Web Services.

One of the design points in the things that we do in order to get the .NET enterprise server down to the market to be a great foundation, I look at three kind of major design points: the abilities, the agilities and then this concept of integrated engineering or better together that Smoke talked a little bit about.

In terms of the abilities, this is like oxygen to your business. This is the ante. You know, customers come and say, “Don’t tell me about your cool features until you can prove to me you’ve got the abilities — reliability, availability, manageability, scalability, serviceability, predictability; all critical to your business. I can’t have these critical Web Services running on a platform that isn’t there for me when I need it.”

And for a while that’s been kind of a rap against Microsoft; are they really in the enterprise? Are they really committed? Do they really understand what these abilities are about?

And I’m going to put up a lot of proof points today to talk about the fact that we have made a huge amount of progress in this space.

I also want to note that this isn’t something that’s new from Microsoft. We’ve been at this for over 12 years now, building a platform, refining it, tuning it to your requirements and really trying to make it a great platform.

And in terms of the abilities, we’ve also got to do something what’s just there. And some core design points are scale out — we believe deeply in that model. I think it’s been proven many times over in the applications you’ve deployed and are deploying now in terms of the mid-tier. You know, you know very well that in terms of scale, if I can keep adding servers, and that’s not a lot of hard work and not a lot of hard work to manage them, I can get incredible scalability, incredible fault tolerance, and it just makes for a very flexible environment.

We also want to make it easy for you to manage these servers, and I’m going to talk a lot about that as we go forward.

Agility: Okay, we just talked a lot about agility as a Web Service. It’s not fun being at the table of your company and always being the one that’s got to pooh-pooh the latest acquisition or the latest merger or say, “No, we can’t get into that business initiative because it’s going to cost us $2 million in systems and it’s going to take eight years to do,” and you don’t want to be the skunk at the garden party, as I used to always say when I was in IT.

It would be fun to be at the table and go, “Yeah, we’re ready. IT is ready. If you want to extend that application out, our architecture is flexible. It’s ready. We’re ready to move. We can be hooked up. Let’s go.”

And that’s the kind of agility that customers over and over tell us they want and need and we hope to bring to market with Web Services.

Engineer for integration: It relates a lot back to TCO. A lot of the things that we do and a lot of the hard that is going on in the .NET enterprise servers is to engineer them to work better together, to give you the best experience and the lowest cost of ownership.

So I’d put forth this little taxonomy, and I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this. This is just kind of a framework for you to kind of think about all the software it takes to really host a Web Service or an application. Kind of at the lowest level you’ve got systems infrastructure, kind of a data center purchase, if you will. You’ve got the operating system, the application server, which we believe in and have shipped integrated in our operating system for many years. We believe it’s important that you can write applications on an operating system. Just like you used to write WIN32 applications, you need to be able to write Web applications. And we don’t get a lot of attention in the application server market, but we ship ours right inside of Windows.

Security: You know, you have to be able to have a firewall. You have to have the demilitarized zone. You have to get the world set up so that you have the proper infrastructure, management, networking, storage.

Then you’ve got kind of the application layer, you know, things that you need to purchase maybe by application: database, commerce for your retail site, collaboration, messaging. You might argue that some of these should be lower or higher. That’s not really the point. The point is it’s a lot of infrastructure to make sure you’ve got a great Web Service.

Now, many of you may not know all the various products we have in this space, and I’m just going to take a second to kind of make sure everybody has the opportunity to see them.

At the systems level: Windows 2000, Application Center managing scale out, ISA integrated firewall and caching, and now recently announced Microsoft Operations Manager to manage your data center and your distributed enterprise.

And above the line in the applications space it’s a huge amount of software to make sure that you’ve got a great environment. And I’m not going to run through all those, but you can see that we have an incredible array of products that support your applications and we’re working hard to integrate those products in a way that gives you the lowest possible cost of ownership and the highest flexibility in that deployment, so that you can spend your time building applications and not tuning the underlying infrastructure.

So some proof points: Now, these are some new ones. We’ve used a lot of these, and this is just a small sample overall. Bank One, one of the largest Internet banks in the world, Internet banking solutions in the world with 900,000 customers online today and over 3,000 customers concurrent at any given time.

RHB Bank, an Asian bank, over 10,000 CRM customers up on Onyx.

Pennzoil has been with us since ’97, up on SQL Server 7.0 a 900 gigabyte SAP database doing over 100,000 dialogue steps per hour.

Credit Suisse, one of their divisions is migrating all of their UNIX Sybase applications to the Microsoft SQL Server platform, citing cost of ownership and flexibility and time to market.

The UK government gateway, a key win with this customer was BizTalk Server and the ability to integrate all of the UK government systems. The UK government is taking a very progressive approach to the Internet and really making all of their services, all of the government services available online in kiosks all over the UK. There will be 63 million users when that’s up with over 13,000 different applications.

Archipelago, a private stock exchange, hooked into the public exchanges, but a private yet and one of six running over 100,000 transactions per second.

So this is just again a small sampling of tier one kinds of applications that we have in the market today. These are the big applications that Microsoft has to keep winning to give all of our customers the confidence that we are in the tier one mission critical kind of operations environment.

Another example of that is a customer that’s with us today from Verizon. Here to tell us about the CFEE billing application, a very important application for Verizon, is Fari Ebrahimini and he’s going to come out and tell us about Verizon and their CFEE applications. Fari?

(Applause.)

FARI EBRAHIMINI: Hi, Paul.

PAUL FLESSNER: How are you doing?

FARI EBRAHIMINI: Great.

PAUL FLESSNER: Excellent. Well, tell us about CFEE and a little bit about Verizon.

FARI EBRAHIMINI: Sure. Verizon is the largest telecom systems company in the country. We have 260,000 employees. It was formed as a merger of GTE and Bell Atlantic. And I’d like to talk to about CFEE, which stands for Common Front-End Engine. For you techies, you know that we always like to have acronyms of all kinds.

And today I’m going to focus more on the CFEE billing, which is a component of the CFEE platform, because we handle repair, ordering and billing, as well as some of the customer relationship management components, to this same platform.

Where we started was back in 1996, for those of you who are actually are from the telecom sector, with the Telecom Act of 1996, to provide not just communications access to our OSS. I thought it was a great thing for us because it allowed us to actually have a reason to go and actually look at our legacy systems, which we had, of course, thousands of.

So we started there and we said, “Well, while we do this we want to provide better and superior customer service to our own customers, service reps, as well as the customers who call us.” We also had a situation where a lot of times in the past, customers would call one center and talk about something, they say, “Excuse me, sir or ma’am, let me transfer you to someone else.” You would actually start explaining the same problem over and over again. We wanted to stop that.

The other thing is that one of the issues for a lot of the companies that have lots of their legacy systems with millions and tens of million of lines of code, is how long it takes to make any change of any size to the same system. Well, we wanted to change that by being able to wrap the legacy system, put some newer technologies up front and start sort of rusting away the back end so we would be able to bring solutions to the market much faster than it used to be. It used to be taking years sometimes to make a change. We wanted it to be in a matter of weeks and months.

A little bit about the architecture of CFEE. Verizon has eight major data centers that have hundreds of thousands of square feet of space, lots of servers and so on. CFEE itself today is deployed in four of those. We started in the former GTE territories, which covered mostly the South and the Western part of the country.

Verizon has over 20,000 call center reps across the country. Currently, the system serves all the reps in the Western sort of part of the company, which is again California, the Southern states, and we plan to roll out to other states.

Now, in terms of size of the database, all of you want to sort of understand what it is, we have eight terabytes of database. We have 11 regions, and the smallest one is 400 gigabytes to 2.4 terabytes of database in a single instance.

They have over 100 million bills online. Somebody asked me, “Are you putting just images of the bill?” No, we are actually storing it and recreate it. When you recall it, it takes about on average less than half a second to retrieve any size of bill that we have online.

And also we do nightly loads of 15 gigabytes of the changes that happen during the day back into the database.

What are some of the benefits of this new environment? Well, one of them has been that we can provide the customer an integrated view when they call in. One of the big measures you hear telecom companies talk about is average handling time, how long does it take to answer a call. Now, for a company like Verizon that has hundreds of millions of calls every year coming into our call centers, every second of average handling time costs money.

So we’ve been able instead of having direct log into tens of systems to answer a call, you just bring it all to the same front end, which is based on the Windows platform and bring it all into one place where they can answer the call. And then, of course, we have CTR integration so we actually look up the information faster so they’ll have that in there.

In terms of how fast we can bring in the solutions to the market, of course, none of us write bad checks, but we do get a few every year, in the matter of thousands. And it takes time to actually — in the past days we used to take a check. We would get an image of it from a bank like Chase or First USA or somebody, and then you would have to actually go manually put it into the system, say the check was bad. Another system would be used to sort of charge the late fees and return check fees; again, a very manual process.

We use the BizTalk server using XML and SOAP interfaces to connect to the bank. We did it with Chase. Union of California, we’ve done it with them. And the whole thing is automated. You get an electronic file; it gets processed, gets sent to the back-end billing system, gets the treatment and also the updated CFEE billing system, which basically is available right online. And we did that basically in about three months, about $400,000 of cost of development saved us at least so far $2 million a year and we were able to shut down one of our check processing centers in Tampa.

In terms of scalability, I talked a little bit about the fact that we had started the smallest one, which was our Hawaii sort of database with 400 gigabytes, and we already have gone to 2.4 terabytes in terms of our California subsidiary, if you will, and we have only sort of 7 months of bills online and we’re looking into 12 months. We have a lot of people call us for at the end of the year bills, they say, “Well, I want to do my taxes,” because they’re business customers and they say, “Can you send it to me?” We can do that.

We had one customer that had about $400,000 in delinquent accounts. I don’t know how many calls they made, but it’s a lot of money. So they called back and said, “Well, I’ve never received a bill.” We looked at the system. We had the wrong address for them. We actually went to the system. We had an e-mail, had all the bills put in the e-mail, shipped it to this customer and they paid it the same day.

So where are we going to go next? We have an upcoming major release of Verizon.com that brings in transactions online, so you should be able to go online and basically to the same kind of things you want to do on the system only 7 by 24. We also have the voice portal, so some of the transactions you can talk to the system, if you will. We’re also looking at supporting devices, so things like Palm Pilots, Pocket PCs, other devices, we’ll support the same thing. And these are going to be built on the .NET servers, which we’re in testing right now.

Also in terms of CFEE billing I was talking about earlier, we’re going to migrate from the NT 4 and Sequel 7 server that we have to a Win 2K platform with the Sequel 2000.

The other plan we have is that given the benefits we’ve received in these sort of former GTE spaces, we’re going to migrate to the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states in former Bell Atlantic and migrate the same capabilities later this year and early next year in terms of building those reps, which is over 12,000 reps to the same platform.

Thank you.

(Applause.)

PAUL FLESSNER: Excellent, Fari. Thanks very much.

So that was another example of a company running a very mission critical application for their business, their entire billing system for a very large business.

Now, here’s the metric in terms of where we are in the marketplace today, and a lot of this stuff doesn’t always get surfaced, and I want to take an opportunity to kind of go through it real quickly.

Windows 2000, as I said, with an application server built in or application services built it, is 62 percent, according to Media Metrics, of secure sites, so those are any sites that are transacted where you’re trying to actually do business, where you need a credit card or any kind of actually secure connection, we have 62 percent market share in that space today; by far and away the most widely deployed application server in the world today. We don’t push that a lot and talk about it a lot, but those services are built into Windows.

Exchange: 75 million installed users today. That’s over two times that of Lotus Notes, the closest competitor.

BizTalk Server has been in the market about five months, over 35 connectors and believe me, our goal is to build many, many more and work with our partners to build many, many more. We want to make sure that you can connect to any application, to any technical architecture, to any vertical. You know, all the SAPs, the legacy connection into S & A, and we’re working hard with the healthcare community today to get a HIPAA connector and in the finance community to get a SWIFT connector; all of those things will keep coming and we’ll work hard to build that into a great development environment.

Commerce Server 2000, in a lot of ways a new release for us, is really built a little bit on the Site Server technology that we had previously but fundamentally a brand new architecture and very exciting for our customers in the marketplace. All of RadioShack.com, over 3,000 concurrent users and ramping up for Christmas this year, their B2C site. Coca Cola in Europe runs their B2B site for all their partners and distributors on Commerce Server. Starbucks uses it for business intelligence, and Coventry Healthcare uses it for their internal site. So a very broad set of opportunities for Commerce Server.

Application Center: This is our scale-out management server. One of the things that you do get in terms of scale out, in addition to the flexibility and the better cost model and the reliability, is you get more management overhead, right, more machines, more to manage. Application Center allows you to manage those on the mid tier as a single server instance, if you will. It allows you to make sure that each machine is exactly in the same state. It allows you to provision machines as they come into the system. It allows you to monitor the health of those machines and take them out of the system if, in fact, they do fail. So Application Center is again a statement of our commitment to make scale out work. Today, Works on the Web and the transaction tier, the Web Services and the application tier in future releases will integrate the database and the caching technology out front so that your unit of management will be at the service level or the unit of the application.

Lycos and State Farm threw out big middle tier Unix systems when they saw the Application Center technology, and you can buy that technology today from Dell in an OEM situation.

And ISA, again, I think an innovative product, combining the firewall and the forward and the reverse cache all in one product so that you get great management and ease of use and a lot of flexibility. You also have the flexibility in large implementations to split those and run them on different machines, so I think a very innovative product in the market.

SQL Server: This is another customer thank you. I tell you, it’s been a long and interesting road with SQL Server. I’ve been with Microsoft for seven years. When I started to manage SQL Server it was a $65 million business and we were really just getting started in that business, even though we’d been in about 11 years now. Two years ago we didn’t have a benchmark on the TPC in the top ten. Today we own the number one benchmark and I think four out of the top five although the numbers change quickly; I can’t keep track.

Number one Windows market share: We’ve taken that honor this year, thanks to your support, and I very much appreciate all of it.

Over a million servers now deployed in all kinds of applications all over the world, over 30 million users and growing every day, and a billion dollar business now, so this is a major step forward for this product and we feel great about it. A lot of customers early on ask me, “So, why is it that you got in the database business? Why the database business? I’ve got Oracle. I’ve got IBM. Those are great vendors. But why the database business?” Well, we really believed that we could do something different there. We really believed that we could make a database a lot more deployable, that we could get the database administrator in a situation where they’re not having to tune and retune the same queries every day because things in the system were changing. We wanted to leave the DBA and have a chance to build new applications. We were pretty gratified to see Oracle and IBM in their latest database releases last week start to talk about things like dynamic memory and auto configuration. Those are features that we put in SQL Server in 1998 with SQL Server 7.0. So it’s been a long road for us, but we feel great about this product and a big thank you to all of you for making it such a success in the market.

Other benchmarks for SQL Server: The other thing that we have to do, a lot of the people say, “TPC, aw, that really doesn’t reflect my workload. You know, I don’t have that kind of prescribed workload. I’ve got real world workloads.” So we worked hard with all of the ISVs out there to make sure that we tuned the database with the application.

Now, these are benchmark wins across all platforms, so there’s no faster benchmark, no database, no Unix system, no 64-bit system on the planet that’s faster than these configurations. And again this is without 64-bit support and today on our hardware platform we scale up just getting the 32-way machines, so we’ve already got very impressive benchmark numbers across the board.

SAP at the bottom, that’s kind of one that everybody watches pretty closely, and this isn’t the SB benchmark, this is the retail module.

If you look on the next slide, we see our most recent results with the SB benchmark, which is probably one of the more popular. You can see just in the last six months, in February of ’01 we had 10,400 users. In the last five months we’ve been able to jump that to over 20,000 users in that benchmark and surpass the largest Sun, Oracle number, which was 19,000 and that was done on a 64-bit machine on 64 processors. This is a 32-bit machine and 32-way processors. So Oracle does have a slightly larger number at 23,000 running on a Fujitsu. That’s an Oracle 8 number, not the new Oracle 9. But again that’s running on 64-bit hardware with 64 processors. We’ve just gotten this 32-way into the market and it’s an incredible proof point and we’ve got a lot more tuning that we can do to it, so we feel from a price performance perspective I believe we’re five times more price effective per transaction than an Oracle Unix system in this configuration.

So you remember I talked about the .NET platform and we talked about what we have to do in the mobile market in order to connect all the rich devices that are out there in the world, over a billion phones coming into the market, and we want to make sure that all those guys are able to hook up to the servers and Exchange and all of our infrastructure.

Mobility is absolutely core to what Microsoft is doing. It’s also absolutely core that we have that connectivity into the .NET Enterprise Servers.

We worked hard on the product and we’ve worked hard with a whole series of partnerships that we’ve put into the market to make sure that we will have this technology widely available to customers as it ships.

So today we’re launching a product called Mobile Information Server. I talked about before we’ve got 72 million customers or users today of exchange. With Mobile Information Server and Outlook Mobile Access all of those customers can have access to their mailbox through their phone, full access — inbox, contacts, calendar, full access to their mailbox, a secure connection out to the carrier for any .NET Enterprise Server application, and then secure deliver of notification of events out to the phones as well.

So to give us a bit of a demo on this today, Chuck Sayed our product manager is going to come out and walk us through a demo. Chuck? Hey, Chuck.

(Applause.)

CHUCK SAYED: Hey, Paul. Thank you very much.

PAUL FLESSNER: So what are you going to show us today?

CHUCK SAYED: Well, I’m going to show you Mobile Information Server and how we were able to use Mobile Information Server to extend a process that was developed by a company today that allows them to get secure access to information and able to send that information to their mobile consultants.

So as Paul mentioned, today we’re announcing the worldwide launch of Mobile Information Server, and I’m going to show you an application that a company had developed to extend a back-end process to handle urgent order requests and keep their mobile consultants more informed.

So to set this up a little bit, we have two businesses, one being Fabricam Consulting and the other being the Wood Grove Bank. And Wood Grove Bank uses Fabricam Consulting in order to install telecommunications and computer equipment for all of their employees on a nationwide basis.

Now, formerly, as any good customer, they have a lot of urgent requests, and so Fabricam Consulting needed a way to manage those urgent requests and keep their mobile consultants more informed. So Fabricam Consulting developed an application that allowed the Wood Grove Bank manager to input the information that delivered an XML document to BizTalk Server for orchestration. BizTalk Server then goes to a SQL Server looking for appropriate consultants that are available for the Wood Grove account and then matches that up against Exchange for availability and scheduling. Once a consultant has been assigned, it drops a meeting in his calendar, drops a task in his active tasks list and then drops an e-mail in his inbox.

Now, this is where Mobile Information Server then starts to extend this process to the mobile devices. One of the benefits of Mobile Information Server is that it can act as a secure message router between your applications and the mobile device.

So in this case, BizTalk Server sent a message via SOAP through Mobile Information Server that has a secure IP SEC connection to a wireless carrier such as Verizon wireless and then ultimately delivers an SMS message down to the mobile phone.

So let’s see this all working in action. So here’s the work order form for customer logon for Fabricam Consulting. And they get into the work order form and the Wood Grove Bank manager enters all the information that he needs to have done for this urgent request. And again, of course, it’s an urgent request so I’m going go make it due this week, and I’m going so submit the request off for processing.

Well, it comes back as a nice work order summary telling me what the work order number was, who the assigned consultant is, the assigned date and the assigned time.

So at the same time, I want to jump over and be Adam Jackson for a minute. So now I’ve been assigned this new work order, and I’m a good employee, but I like to take long lunches and I like to play a little golf, so managing my time is real important. So now during this process I receive a message from the process letting me know that I’ve been scheduled for a new work order. So as you can see, I’ve received the new message and I can go in and see that I’ve been notified of the new work order from the customer Wood Grove Bank, the work order number and the date that I’ve been assigned.

So, armed with this information, I can now browse into the Fabricam portal that includes Outlook Mobile Access, as well as other applications that Fabricam has decided to integrate out to my mobile device. So for my purposes, I’m going to go Outlook Mobile Access.

Now, what’s happening here is that I’m requiring a secure connection between the mobile phone and Mobile Information Server that’s authenticating me and granting me access to my Exchange server. So what you see is I now have access to my inbox, calendar, contacts and tasks, and I could manipulate these as if I was sitting at my desktop.

So now I want to jump you ahead in time and assume that me as a good employee, I have now completed my task that was assigned to me, have been to the customer and I’ve completed that task. And as a normal part of managing my priorities I now browse into my tasks to mark that task as being complete. So if I hit Menu and I mark that task as complete, it will come back that the item has been completely successfully.

So what’s happened in this second half of the scenario? Again, as I mentioned before, I’ve required a secure connection from my mobile device through Mobile Information Server and granting access to Exchange. Then as I marked that task complete, BizTalk Server picked up the rest of the process by placing a record in an ERP system, such as SAP or Great Plains, which gives me access to that information from my work order application to view any additional billing information.

So if I go back to my work order plan, and I’ve already got the user name and password, and if I put in the word order number and submit, you can see that it will come back with the information as having been fully completed.

Apparently, I’m having a slight delay in my application. Well, I must not have made my right connection, but it would have come back with the date completed, the cost that had been put into the billing system.

So what I’ve tried to show you here are three basic things. One is the wireless access to Exchange; number two, that you can integrate back-end processes that you’ve developed in applications that you’ve developed and extend those out to mobile devices; and number three, that you can use Mobile Information Server as a secure message router to deliver urgent messages onto your mobile device.

PAUL FLESSNER: Excellent. Outstanding. Thanks, Chuck.

(Applause.)

CHUCK SAYED: Thank you very much.

PAUL FLESSNER: So one of the things that makes mobility happen is working with a broad array of partners, all kinds of partners, hardware, the carrier, and also a lot of consulting firms to make sure that we’ve got good people out in the field that can help build these kinds of applications.

And one of the customers that has been working with us from the very beginning on this is Vodaphone, and today they’re here to talk about some exciting new services that they’re going to be offering on Mobile Information Server this summer. And to do that is Chico Janzing. Chico, come on out. How are you?

(Applause.)

CHICO JANZING: Good morning, Paul. How are you? Nice to see you.

PAUL FLESSNER: Nice to see you.

CHICO JANZING: Thanks for having Vodaphone here at the Tech Ed conference.

PAUL FLESSNER: You bet. It’s our pleasure. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about Vodaphone and then a little bit about your application?

CHICO JANZING: Well, Vodaphone is the world’s leading wireless company in the world. We want to be the largest telecommunications and wireless provider.

And I think since Vodaphone is new to the United States, maybe some statistics about Vodaphone. We are the world’s largest wireless company. And if you measure it by market capitalization, we are actually one of the top ten largest companies in the world as well. And we have a strong presence in the U.S. through Verizon wireless where Vodaphone owns about 45 percent stake in that company. And in the United Kingdom it is the largest leading mobile operator with over 12 million subscribers there. We operate in 29 countries across five continents. We have ownership of about over 83 million subscribers.

And also we are not only a wireless provider; we are also a data services provider. We are targeting between 20 and 25 percent of data revenue from data services and Internet usage by year 2004.

So the relationship between Microsoft and Vodaphone UK is a strategic one. I think the important word in this relationship is the word trust. I think we both share mutual respect for each other, the common goals, and the ability to reach out globally and our dedication to customer service, and also the relationship to jointly develop and market mobile solutions worldwide.

PAUL FLESSNER: Excellent. Tell us a little bit about the applications you’re going to do.

CHICO JANZING: The application that we are building is called Vodaphone Office Live. It is based on Microsoft’s Information Server. And it is a suite of applications, a seamless suite of applications that is designed for business customers. The first of the applications is Microsoft Outlook access through mobile devices. So this is what we are launching in the UK in July and also targeting to launch in other countries in the near future.

PAUL FLESSNER: That’s exciting. So all this summer you’re going to be launching.

CHICO JANZING: Yeah, I’m very excited about the opportunity and launching this service.

PAUL FLESSNER: Wow, outstanding. And Microsoft thanks you for the opportunity. Thanks very much, Chico.

CHICO JANZING: Thanks, Paul. Bye.

(Applause.)

PAUL FLESSNER: So another product that we’re going to talk about today is Microsoft Content Management Server. Content management is something that comes up a lot. You go in and talk to a customer about their site and they say, “Gee, you know, we want a lot more dynamic access to our site. We want to put information up fast or we want our business people to have direct access to the site. We want to really be able to broadcast out to a large diverse set of devices and make it very personalized for the customer.

In responding to these needs, Microsoft acquired a company called Encompass, and we’ll be offering a product this summer called Content Management Server. Content Management Server is an incredibly flexible technology that allows the business user to have direct control over the environment and allows them to actually create the templates for the site, to author content directly and put it into the site, and then automatically edit that content and do it kind of dynamically so you can see it, and then the ability to also publish that information directly out to the Web. You can version it. And you’ve got a whole host of different technologies that you can deploy that site to, and the technology will also adapt and make sure that you get the right display for the right device.

This is not a V1 product. That was another pointed we wanted to make. Our active customer is with us today. Under the Encompass name the product was Resolution. The product that’s shipping today is Resolution 4.0. We’ll be rebranding that product and shipping it under the Microsoft name this summer.

And to demo this and so you can get a good feel of the technology is a product manager, Dan Cogan, product managers Dan Cogan and Chris Ramsey. Dan and Chris, why don’t you come out and walk us through this real quick? Hey, Dan.

(Applause.)

DAN COGAN: Great. Thanks for having us.

PAUL FLESSNER: That’s all right.

DAN COGAN: So we’re really excited to be here today to be able to show the world Microsoft’s new Content Management Server 2001. As you were mentioning, there are probably a couple hundred customers right now worldwide using the product, but one of the sites that we’re really proud of is Microsoft’s first public facing Web site using Content Management Server, and it’s Xbox.com. So what we’re going to do is really walk through what Xbox.com is doing today and some of those things that they will be doing with the product.

So let’s just jump right in and sort of see what the user experience is on Xbox.com.

So in this example when the anonymous user comes to Xbox.com, what they’re getting is today’s promotion. And it just happens to be about an NFL game. But what the Content Management Server product does is allows us to start getting content out there easily from the Web team or from the product management teams or whoever it is that needs to manage content to get it to that Web site and then target it to specific audiences.

So in this case, if I were to log in as a recognized user on the site, who happens to be really interested in racing games, when I log in, you’re going to see the same URL, the same cover page return specific content for this user and their profile, so this particular user gets racing content, in this case in the form of a graphic.

Not only can we start targeting content according to who they are, but the product is also going to allow us to start targeting functionality on that Web site. So in this case I’m going to log in as a member of the product marketing team from the Xbox group, who needs to put out content about a new game that’s going to be released. So when I log into this site, now because I’m a content contributor to the Web site, I’m immediately recognized by my profile as someone who has a right to edit this Web site.

So I’m going to go into the news area and choose to edit this site. When I go into edit mode, I now have all the functionality of Content Management Server and in this case we’re going to just simply go in and create a new page. I’m going to be able to select a template. The user is going to be able to go in and ask for a template that gives them a predefined look and feel, form structure and functionality, and I could simply start adding Dan’s stuff in here, but the reality is that our content contributors probably have their content in something like Office XP and in this case we have a press release that’s fully formatted as we want to deliver it to the Web, so I’m simply going to go in, cut and paste content from my desktop application right into the browser. We retain all the rich text formatting from that content, including table structures and so on. And so now we have our press release content.

But it’s possible that our user wants to do much more than just deliver text. In this case, we want to go out there and actually give people some media files and we’re going to actually attach a flash media, so my user is going to simply select that, insert it into the page and give an alternate image file. We’re going to go into the image galleries and select the specific image that we want for this press release and actually give it the text for that image.

So this is a pretty simple press release, but this is what my author needs to get out immediately to the Web. So I’m going to go in here and save this, give is the press release name, and then I want to do a few things. It’s important to make sure that our press releases are out on a timely manner, so I’m going to go in and set some page properties to ensure that I get my press release out to the world at a point in time, make sure it comes off the Web at a specific point in time, but most importantly I’m going to start profiling my content as an action game and the publisher is Microsoft and so we’re going to say who the publisher is, and this permits us to start profiling the content so that we know who the intended target audience is. Then we’re going to say let’s submit this page.

So my author has created the content and submitted that content, but it so happens that my boss, who’s on the other end over there, is at a trade show and I need his approval to get my content live on this Web site. So what I’ve done is through submitting it he’s going to receive an e-mail on his mobile device, in this case, a Pocket PC, so, Chris, could you take a look at your Pocket PC and make sure that your e-mail is there?

CHRIS RAMSEY: Sure. So I’ll go ahead and have a look at my Pocket PC. Now, while Dan was playing the role of the business user, that he owns the content on the site, I’m in the role of the business manager that’s typically going to be out on the road but wants to make sure that we get those checks and balances in place before the content actually goes live on the site.

So I’m off at a trade show and what I’m going to do here is I’m just going to open up my e-mail on my iPaq and quickly to a synchronization, and I see that I’ve received an e-mail from Dan Cogan. And what’s happened here is the Content Management Server’s workflow feature has automatically sent me an e-mail based on Dan submitting the page for my approval into the workflow.

So I open up the e-mail and I see that I have an e-mail that’s saying you have a posting awaiting your approval on the Web site, and I have a link right to the Web site. So I’m going to hit the link to Xbox.com and we see that I actually get pulled right into Xbox.com live, but one thing that’s interesting about this, before I go in and actually approve this page, is that the site actually looks similar to what it looked like in Dan’s browser, but at the same time it looks different. And what’s happening here is we’re actually managing dynamic content and what that means is that as the content is being served up from Content Management Server, it recognizes what device is asking for the content and based on that it automatically and dynamically grabs a different set of templates to serve the content up, making sure that the content and the user experience stays positive regardless of the device.

So I’m going to go in and I have the same go-to-edit site button on my iPaq that Dan had in his browser, and I’m going to hit that. And, of course, instead of getting a large toolbar on my iPaq, I just get the function that I need, which is what’s awaiting my approval. So we see that we have Halo for XBox that Dan just created, so I click on that just to preview it and make sure the content looks good and I’m happy with it, and I am, so I’m going to go ahead and just go back and I’m just going to easily check it off and approve it, and that’s all there is to it. So when I go back to the home page, that page is now live on the site and all I had to do was go in and approve it.

DAN COGAN: So now you’ll see that on my Web site, either when I refresh my browser or perhaps revisit this Web site, the content that my boss approved while on the road is going to be dynamically added to this Web page. So it’s now going out, refreshing the content and the content that was approved from the mobile device is now available live on the Web page because my user is a target audience that’s intended for this content.

Can you flip to that press release?

CHRIS RAMSEY: Sure.

DAN COGAN: So now you’ll see that we have the exact same content repurposed dynamically according to the target user and the target device who’s intended to see it.

This is really the power of what the new Content Management Server 2001 is delivering to people like Xbox and enterprises around the world, the ability to easily create cut and paste, drag and drop content live into a browser, submit it through a workflow process and have it end up on your public Web site without ever having your business people come back to you folks, the IT guys and say, “Please change the look and feel of my Web site.” As long as you’ve done your job and built the infrastructure for this content, then the businesspeople become the content owners of your Web site. And that’s really the Content Management Server.

PAUL FLESSNER: Excellent. Thanks a lot, Dan and Chris.

(Applause.)

PAUL FLESSNER: The Content Management Server is the technology that we’ll be investing in tremendously, again, as a statement of our commitment to make sure that we have a full platform capable of deploying all your applications and supporting all of them going forward.

So I want to talk a little bit about the roadmap. We’ve talked a lot about different things today. We started out with Web Services, and I wanted to make sure you understand our commitment to Web Services. I want to also make sure you understand that Web Services are real today. This is not something that you need to think about the future; it is something you need to think about for the future, but it’s also something you need to do something about today.

We’ve worked hard to bring these products to market today, working hard with the standards committees and working hard with all of our partners and sometimes competitors to make sure that you can actually do a Web Service and that we’ve got all the standards in place to do that, business orchestration through BTS so that you can get connected, scale-out management so you can make scale out a reality and deploy it in a cost-effective way, mobility and content management, which we just talked about; you know, all done with an eye toward ease of use because we’re working hard to make sure these products integrate and run well on our platform.

XML made easier in 2002: We believe we’re on the right strategy. We’re going to work hard to make it even easier. Bill tomorrow is going to talk about Visual Studio and Visual Studio .NET. Whether that gets released at the end of this year or very early in 2002, it will be released in that general timeframe and it’s our commitment to making it very easy to build these applications, both the connected and the mobile applications and I think that he’ll talk about both.

Language freedom, common language runtime: This is a very important innovation. There have been a lot of good things that have come out of the Java VM, a lot of things that customers like about the memory protection and all that provides, but it’s really tied to Java. We’ll be offering a technology that will allow lots of different languages. Java wasn’t the first language to be invented and it certainly won’t be the last. And you want to be able to innovate and bring new languages into your environment, and you will be able to do that with the language runtime.

Sixty-four bit and the new hardware that comes up for scale-up, which is still a very practical thing to do in many applications, especially on the database; that technology will be coming forth in 2002.

The Microsoft Foundation Services or
“HailStorm”
, as you’ve heard it called, is a technology and a set of services that we’ll bring together into the market, services like Passport, My Calendar, My Mail, My Storage, all those kinds of services that you can aggregate and plug into from your business.

And Whistler Server will ship in this timeframe as well, deeply built on the concept of XML, an XML parser inside, and enabling all your applications that run today to run even better as a Web Service.

2003: Really, I think that’s a timeframe that Web Services will really hit their stride and they will be broadly deployed. That’s why I think it’s so important that you spend time this week at Tech Ed learning about Web Services, learning about how to build them, starting to think about what applications might be your first candidate to go, starting to think about what applications you might want to re-architect.

We’re going to be doing things very deeply into our products in the 2003 timeframe. Those products are under development today. Yukon is the codename for the next release of SQL Server. We’re going to be working hard to put XML deep into the database engine so that you will be able to program against XML in the mid-tier, and then when you want to persist that data, it will persist in a very similar structure and you can manipulate it in the database and query it in the database in a very natural form for the XML developer.

And XML design service: You know, today the best XML design is notepad and that’s not exactly the most user-friendly experience. There’s not a lot of help there. We’re going to be working hard to make sure we’ve got a good XML design service available for you.

I talked about trying to manage an application in its entirety. You can only do that if you have an integrated stack of products and we’re going to work hard to make sure that with application centers you can start to think about the entire application top to bottom and we’re going to talk more about that in a minute.

Integrated caching and integrated diagnostics: This is something that’s just very fundamental to what we do and I think are big advantages to you as a customer, and I’m going to talk a bit more about those on the next slide.

So this is the platform. This is what you the customer or the developer see when you want to build a new application or a Web Service. At the top, caching; the edge cache is very important and there’s a lot that you want to do in there today in terms of caching up content and also possibly setting content that maybe it is dynamic data but maybe you’d like to cache it because you know it doesn’t change very often, and then notify me, in fact, if it does change. And that’s what I call integrated caching.

When you have the ability to have the data cache, the mid-tier cache on the Web and apps server all the way out to the firewall cache, being able to be worked together, and you as the developer say, “No, you know, I know that the customer numbers don’t change that often, and today I can’t cache any of those; I have to jump back into the database, and that’s about 5,000 times more expensive than if I had it local in memory ready to go.” So we’re going to work hard on things like integrated caching.

I’d already talked about the language runtime, where you’ll have this ability to write the components or the service, write it in a language of your liking and then be able to use that code going forward. If you decide that you want to change, that there’s a new language that’s more appropriate for a different component or a different piece of code that you want to write, you won’t have to switch out the entire infrastructure underneath. The cache will still be there. The Web server will still be there. The transaction services and COM+ are still there, and SQL Server is still there. All of that runtime will be ubiquitous across our platform so that you’ll have your choice of language, which I believe is an incredibly powerful thing for the developer.

As I said, we’re going to go deep with the XML data model, okay, the ability to program in the mid-tier, out on the cache and back into the database in a way that’s natural for the XML developer.

Diagnostics: Distributed applications across three tiers or end tiers are incredibly complex to diagnose, one of the biggest problems I had as a developer. I often hear, you know, “Look, I hit go on the browser and it took 15 seconds to come back; what happened?” Today it takes a room of 15 software experts to even start to figure out and break down and diagnose the problem, but if you could click on a transaction and it would explode out, three milliseconds at the client, five milliseconds on the wire, 15 milliseconds on the mid-tier — whoa, 12 seconds back in SQL Server; what happened. Well, yesterday we dropped an index. That’s the kind of diagnostics that you can get with an integrated stack of products and we’re going to work hard to bring those to market.

Security: Too many concepts, too many ways to set it up, too many opportunities to make a mistake. We want to unify concepts such as roles so that you can set things up and make them work together across the platforms.

And I’ve already talked about management a couple times.

But that’s just an example of the work that we’ll be doing for our 2003 kind of timeframe of products. We don’t get all the problems solved then I’m sure, but we’ll be absolutely focused on making sure that we’re making good progress toward each of these areas. It’s something I’d push hard on the engineering team in terms of better together, and we’re very much focused on it, and these are kind of the high level points that we’ll be working hard on.

Now, Lyle Curry, one of our product managers, is going to come out and give you a quick demo of an early draft of our Yukon code. Lyle, why don’t you come out and talk to us about Yukon?

(Applause.)

LYLE CURRY: Thanks, Paul.

PAUL FLESSNER: What have you got for me there, Lyle?

LYLE CURRY: Well, you’ve been telling them a little bit about the future, Paul, and what I’d like to do today is share with them a sneak peak at an early build of SQL Server Yukon that you had just talked about.

Now, what they’re going to see is they’re going to see Yukon harnessing the power of XML and working with structure data as well as semi-structured and unstructured data across the enterprise.

They’re also going to get a chance to see Yukon hosting the .NET common language runtime, which will enable developers to reach new levels of productivity on SQL Server.

Now, for the purposes of this demo, I’m going to play the role of an employee at a toy company called Webotics. Webotics manufactures toy robots and has a little bit of a problem, because their flagship product is suffering a bit of a sales decline. And I’m here in my inbox and I see that my boss has sent me an urgent meting request and he wants to get to the bottom of this problem.

As I scroll through the agenda, I notice that the document is highlighted by a new technology in Office XP called smart tags. Now, smart tags allow relevant terms and phrases in documents to be recognized and associated with actions. This means that an Office document can now become the starting point for intelligent business analysis.

So I’m going to go ahead and choose from my smart tag menu here and the smart tag is actually going to from an XML-based query, send it along to execute a stored procedure in SQL Server Yukon.

My result set is an XML document that’s been rendered intelligently for us here. It contains structured data from our line-of-business systems, as well as semi-structured and unstructured data like messages and documents.

I see an interesting message here about some dissatisfied customers. Let’s look into this a little more deeply.

As I go through this message, it’s becoming apparent to me that we may have a problem in our C. Leapyear product line with one of our suppliers, Super Gear. So again I’m going to leverage the power of Smart tags to go ahead and execute that stored procedure on Yukon.

Now, I got a nice result set. What I notice right away is that this supplier actually works across several of our product lines, and I’m really interested in what’s going on with C. Leap year. So I want to refine the query. I’m going to go ahead and deselect the other product lines that this supplier works on and I’m going to add some additional data types. I’ve already got reports and contacts and messages, as well as documents. I’m going to go ahead and add in appointments and events. Let’s go for the whole shooting match.

And let’s re-query. Bam. Now, that’s what I was looking for. The problem is clear. I’ve got an alarming rate of increase in my defects from this supplier, but I’ve got a corresponding rate of decline of my sales. I need to send this to my team so that they can do some quick action on this.

Now, because this is an XML document, my team can take this and work with it and do additional analysis if they so choose.

Why don’t we go ahead now and take a look behind the scenes of that stored procedure I was talking about?

Okay. So as I bring up the stored procedure, here’s a look under the covers at the code. Now, if you’re a SQL Server developer out in the audience, you might be thinking, “Now, that doesn’t look like key SQL to me. What’s the deal with these curly braces and these semicolons?” This stored procedure is actually written in a language called C# and this is possible because Yukon hosts the .NET common language runtime. So I can develop my server-side stored procedures in any .NET language.

PAUL FLESSNER: Including Key SQL.

LYLE CURRY: Including Key SQL.

PAUL FLESSNER: Absolutely, okay.

LYLE CURRY: It’s still a first class language for stored procedures, absolutely, and getting stronger all the time. (Laughter.)

PAUL FLESSNER: But maybe C# will be a little better.

LYLE CURRY: Yeah, C#; the point is if your developer gets to work with the language they’re comfortable with, they’re going to be more productive.

PAUL FLESSNER: Right. It’s just important to know we certainly won’t orphan Key Sequel. We’ll keep evolving that and moving it forward as well.

LYLE CURRY: Absolutely.

Let’ go ahead and also I want to point out this tool. This is a really early look at a next generation tool called SQL Workbench. Now ultimately this will replace the tool we know today as Query Analyzer. A couple things I want to point out here are this tool is written entirely in managed code and hosts the Visual Studio .NET shell. So this allows for maximum developer productivity.

Let’s go ahead and run this stored procedure, and right away you’re going to notice as I type in the execute statement that I picked up some nice productivity benefits from the shell. So here I’ve got Intellisense helping me out with the stored procedure, which I need, and there is a tool tip with all the parameters I can pass into that stored procedure.

PAUL FLESSNER: Wow, that’s great.

LYLE CURRY: Now, I don’t trust myself to type those in; I’ve got to be honest. So I’m going to go ahead and just execute one I’ve already typed in. We’ll run the query, connect to the server and there’s my result set. It’s an XML document. The top of the document contains the query parameters. This is actually exactly the smart tag was passing in when we were showing the front end before. Down below we have the data so here, for instance, is a message.

So what you’ve seen today is the next generation of SQL Server Yukon running and working with XML data, leveraging it across structured, semi-structured, as well as unstructured data, hosting a common language runtime, empowering developers to work with their language of choice and empowering with the flexibility to use the latest and greatest tools that are available.

PAUL FLESSNER: Outstanding. Excellent. Thanks a lot, Lyle. Appreciate.

LYLE CURRY: Thank you. Appreciate it.

(Applause.)

PAUL FLESSNER: So, Yukon is a very important release for us to continue to build on the success of SQL Server. The core kind of themes there are the common language runtime and deep integration of XML and access to lots of different kinds of data.

So we’ve covered a lot this morning. I really appreciate your time and attention. We talked about Web Services and we talked about the .NET Enterprise Servers and we launched a few products, as I said.

I want to encourage all of you to take advantage of Tech Ed and all the deep technical sessions it offers, start building Web Services today, deploy those .NET servers and get ready for Visual Studio.NET.

I thank you all very much for your time and I thank you for your business.

(Applause.)

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