MMS in the Press

Always happy to get some press on my group. From an eWeek article yesterday:

BARCELONA, Spain—Microsoft plans to increase the number of customers that it provides managed services to over the next year, but these services will focus primarily on messaging and collaboration rather than on desktop management.

The company’s foray into managed services to date “has been a real learning experience. To say that we found a few issues would be an understatement,” Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s senior vice president for servers and tools, said in his keynote address at IT Forum here Nov. 14.

Microsoft started its managed services business with a pilot program with Energizer Holdings Inc., in St. Louis, which was then expanded to include XL Capital, in Hamilton, Bermuda.

The software maker, based in Redmond, Wash., also believes that a substantive number of customers will, over time, want to acquire some of their IT infrastructure as a service they paid for, Muglia said at a press event following his speech.

For those who are wondering what my role is, I am the Collaboration (i.e. SharePoint) lead on the XL project, and I am also leading the definition/business planning around our next generation collaboration platform. I’m about to head up a virtual team spanning product, service, and operational teams looking at how the enterprise hosted SharePoint solution should evolve. Very exciting project, and a great time to be at Microsoft.