Fostering innovation

In what particular areas do you see the local software development community focused more on?

[There is] a lot of property development going on. What is interesting is they are exporting a lot of skills now, and they are using our software — .Net, Sharepoint, Office — and they are putting more and more technology into the properties.

They have Windows XP controlling some of their apartments now, so I think that is an interesting area.

Emirates Airline is our largest development customer here. It has a pretty big development team — more than 500 developers, making it a big development shop.

What’s interesting there is Emirates Airline was traditionally a Java shop, but now it is doing more and more .Net projects. In fact, that seems to be accelerating now since the airline industry becomes increasingly cost-conscious.

In fact, the key factors that they have accelerated there, they have developed based on .Net. It [Emirates] has already gone live with a .Net application, which is all about its frequent flyer programme.

And it is about to move its largest single development from J2EE to .Net. It’s a very large project; it’s like 500 man-years.

Also, I ask the customers I meet where they are buying software development from and it seems to be Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt, more than India, so far.

But India is growing, particularly in certain domain expertises like mobility.

That is very interesting for me personally, because I can see, particularly in some of these countries, that we need to step up software development.

Here in the GCC countries, I think the need is to have gro-wth programmes for architects and senior developers. And this is something we are working on right now.

We are stepping up our investment here in the Gulf. We have a new DPE for that starting in the Gulf shortly.

What kind of programmes are you looking at offering
in the GCC?

We do a number of things in Microsoft. Firstly, we develop the sales and marketing for developer tools, such as Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team System for example.

Secondly, we do what we call platform evangelism to professional developers. We show developers what can be done using the latest technology, particularly Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005.

Over the next few months we will be doing more and more around Windows Vista and Office 12. Those are the four key platform technologies for us.

We also do similar platform branches for students, or what we call the next generation of professional developers.

We have special programmes focused on software architects. That’s a distinct audience for us.

They have very special needs around architectural blueprints, patents and practices. We actually have a team that just works on patents and practices and architectural blueprints.

One thing I have come here to explore is the extent of the growth of the local independent software vendor (ISV) industry.

The feedback I have so far is that it is something the UAE government is focused on gro- wing over a period of time — to be less dependent on imports of software and to grow
more of the local software economy.

We are very keen to support that activity. We have a number of programmes focused on ISVs, both on technical readiness and business.

What is very popular right now is how they can use Microsoft Office as a front end or a smart client to the ISVs’ applications.

We’re also growing the amount of associated readiness materials because a lot of these ISVs are quite small.

They may not have much in the way of marketing or business development expertise, so we are growing them out of educating ISVs in business enablement issues.

And the creation of a new, larger Gulf organisation for Microsoft gives us the opportunity to work with local ISVs, say in Bahrain or Dubai, and actually help them to grow regionally.

I think that’s one of the things that will be a lot easier to do, and that is certainly something that we are very focused on.

One of the main issues we’ve heard from local academics, developers and analysts is the lack of support from both the governments and large IT companies to support innovative technology projects. What can Microsoft do to address the issue?

Both government and Micro- soft have a part to play in terms of developing a local software ecosystem.

I think it’s interesting to see what other countries have done.
It’s very important to have a good supply of technical graduates.

Governments tend to be quite involved in higher education, so it’s very important to attract and retain great teachers in higher education. I look at that as a very important role that the government can do.

When those technical students actually graduate, then one of the things that Microsoft can do is really help to connect them with the commercial software companies.

There is a very good example in Egypt, where they have something called a .Net University and they actively bring students, who’ve been doing final year projects on .Net, together with Microsoft-certified partners.

I think that is something that I’m keen to spread more broadly, so I think there is an opportunity to do that here in the Gulf.

There is also access to capital. There are some students who are more entrepreneurial, who don’t necessarily want to work for a large company, they want to set up their own company, and that’s also where governments can play a role.

In some countries the government has tax credits for R&D investment, I think that’s very positive. I don’t know what’s done here, but it’s a great model.

It basically means that small, proper companies can invest in software tools and software development and then put those investments against taxation.

Microsoft can also help in providing technical and architectural design.

What’s very popular is our Empower programme. For less than US$400 we provide our full suite of software development tools for enterprise developers, which is an amazing thing to help small software development companies.

On the joint marketing, what we will do also is if there is a small, innovative software company that is doing great stuff on .Net, we are prepared to accelerate the Microsoft partner model.

They may be a small company but if their solutions are really innovative, then we will treat them as if they were a larger partner in terms of the level of joint marketing we are prepared to do.

Coming back to the role of government, I think it’s really around technical education; you have to have a great supply of those. I think it’s around ensuring there is great access to capital to invest.

I think government procurement can really help as well because the best form of capital is revenue for a software company. So if government procurement favours some local application providers that will help.

||**|||~|Brownbody.jpg|~|Positive responses to CTPs have meant the company will be releasing three CTP versions — in December, February and April — of the forthcoming Windows Vista application rather than shipping a Beta 2 version.|~| What impact does Microsoft’s recent announcement about its proposed Office Open XML standards have to the developer community?

Having opened XML support in all our products has really been well received. There is a great opportunity to extend Microsoft Office because you can extend the XML data format.

I think that with this, and particularly the next version of Office — Office 12 — is where Office becomes a really mainstream professional development platform in its own right. I think that’s the big change.

At the launch of SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006, Steve Ballmer mentioned that an important part of the development process was the
Community Technical Previews (CTPs). How important are these CTPs to Microsoft and would you continue using them in future product developments?

Yes, we will continue using them in future product developments. These [SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006] were the first major products that we changed the way we developed them.

Before that, we tend to have a small number, two or three large beta versions, which may come out six or nine months apart.

But with Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005, in particular, we moved to a much more frequent sharing of the code before launch with the community.

So it is the case that with Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 we had far more developer community feedback into those products than any other Microsoft products.

We had something called the Visual Studio Beta Experience, for instance, and we had 115,000 developers in the EMEA region registered for that and providing feedback.

We had a web-based feedback centre and they can actually report their feedbacks and then they can track online what happens to those feedbacks.
This is a good example of where we looked at the community development processes and saw opportunities to make what we are doing better.
The experience for our developers has been very positive as well, so that is something we are going to do more.

In fact, we will do something very similar with Windows Vista as well.

Rather than wait and ship Beta 2, we are now planning to do a CTP in December, a CTP in February and a CTP in April. We will do three CTPs in a time when we would release one beta version.

Having direct involvement with the developer community, particularly with the local developer community, what have they been telling you about the things they require in order to build better applications?

We are doing a bunch of things specifically for security. The two things that developers have requested for security the most are: one, they’ve asked for Microsoft to make available a lot of tools within our Trustworthy Computing initiative.

For instance, we developed a bunch of tools to do static analys- is of code as part of our internal security drive. In Visual Studio 2005 we take those tools and actually put them in Visual Studio.

The second thing that they’ve asked for is for a prescriptive guidance on how to architect a secure system using Microsoft technology.

Microsoft has many different ways of configuring and customising, and the developers want us to give them a blueprint for what is the most secure way of developing applications and how to configure and set it up.

We’ve also launched a set of patents and practices around security to build on .Net application.

Also, what continues to be a requirement is productivity — speed of development and productivity. We have done a lot in Visual Studio 2005 to reduce the amount of code we have to write.

What we did over the last three years is to do an amazing amount of analysis of customers’ and partners’ applications that they have written in .Net, and we were looking for repeating patterns.

Then we have taken those repeating patterns and we have created codes or code snippets inside Visual Studio to handle those. The classic case is web development.

In many web developments, we’ve reduced the amount of code you have to write because we looked at literally tens of thousands of web apps and we found, for instance, a lot of codes were associated with handling identity and authentication.

Now in ASP .Net version two, we built all that code inside it. We had dramatic reductions in amount of code.

We also had a lot of feedback from developers that they want it to be easier to write mobile applications.

So now in Visual Studio 2005, for instance, we have not only introduced much easier mobile applications, but they can actually test them in a series of simulators where you can actually simulate how your application is going to execute on a range of different mobile devices.

The other big area is deployment of smart client applications, and we really got a lot of innovation there. We have this ClickOnce technology in version 2 of .Net.

It turns out that it is actually quite easy to distribute a smart client application. The difficulty is when you want to update it, and that’s the bit we are really proud in version two of the .Net framework.

So now, the .Net framework can handle things such as, if you create a smart client application that client is capable of checking on the server whether there is an update for it, and if there is, it would prompt the user whether he wants the new version installed.||**||