MICROSOFT INVADES MOTOROLA FOR CARRIER-SAVVY EXECUTIVE

Microsoft announced last week that telecom industry veteran Maria Martinez is the new executive in charge of the company's efforts to boost its communications sector business, which has struggled to fully integrate products in the service provider arena.

Martinez, who was named vice president of Microsoft's Communications and Mobile Solutions unit, previously was a vice president and general manager at Motorola, responsible for that vendor's Internet connectivity solutions and digital cellular infrastructure divisions. She also spent 12 years at Bell Labs.

Microsoft recently revamped its service provider unit, formerly known as the Network Service Provider group, by putting media and entertainment under its umbrella and renaming it the Communications Sector. The group Martinez heads is part of the overall Communications Sector.

“The group was renamed primarily because of the synergies we see between those two markets: pure communications with media and entertainment,” Martinez said.

Microsoft brought Martinez in to drive home the company's total-cost-of-ownership story with service providers and to grow the business. While the company made good progress getting its server technology into service provider environments, and its device play has been successful, the time is right for that next level of adoption, she said. “This year and next year are turnaround years for this sector, so we are positioning ourselves for significant growth in this new era of services that go beyond just voice and the Internet,” Martinez said.

Microsoft's objective, as it has been for the four years since the NSP group was formed, is to provide software for the end-to-end delivery of those services. “My team's goal is to bring the whole device-to-infrastructure-to-partner strategy together,” Martinez said. “We're not going to focus on dictating the user interface of the device, but we will make sure that if you want to download a new application to a device, we have the service delivery platform in the back end to do that.”

The company will be making several announcements this month at the ITU's Telecom World conference in Geneva that explain how it plans to achieve that goal.

The most effective move the company could make would be into Tier 1 deployments of its Web services-based infrastructure solutions (known as .NET), according to a report issued earlier this year by Karl Whitelock, program director for OSS competitive strategies at Stratecast Partners. The company's vision was aggressive for a conservative industry still smarting from the efficiency and integration issues that plague it, Whitelock said. Microsoft also provides a compelling solution for addressing issues such as process automation and integration, he said. But the lack of a proven showcase for Web services success is a significant challenge, along with the ongoing evolution of interface standards such as XML, SOAP and UDDI, Whitelock said.

However, Microsoft now has showcase deployments with Qwest Communications, Verizon Communications and Deutsche Telekom, according to Martinez. “Everything we do as a company when it applies to this space is Web services,” she said. “I have not found a customer in the world that is not committed to Web services as the way to run systems going forward.”

Martinez said service providers are about ready to put money behind that commitment. Years of cost reduction, optimization and restructuring are coming to an end. And with continued consolidation, customers are looking to have a common infrastructure across their networks, she said.

“There are a lot of [requests for proposal] right now for services-integrated platforms, and that is a clear trend that has changed the dynamics for us,” Martinez added.