Microsoft's NT on the march: Vendors, carriers warm to Windows for reliability and time to market

Mention the words "operating system" in a free-association session with a computer professional, and the responses likely will be "Windows" and "Microsoft"-unless that professional works in telecommunications, where Unix still reigns as the operating system of choice.

While the software world generally has perceived Microsoft as a 600-pound gorilla, carriers widely regarded Windows NT with skepticism and even derision when it was first put forward as an alternative solution.

But now-less than a year after Microsoft outlined a strategy that positioned NT not as a replacement for Unix but as a complementary operating system with specific advantages suited to the new telecom environment-NT has won a considerable number of converts among carriers and network equipment vendors.

"We really don't have to do much evangelizing anymore," said Jonathan Usher, telecommunications marketing manager at Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft. "Our customers in the vendor community and their customers-the carriers-are creating a pull for NT."

That pull is based entirely on economics. Early versions of NT had a somewhat spotty reputation for reliability, making carriers understandably reluctant to base important systems on NT. Also, while carriers can deal with many different Unix vendors, only Microsoft offers NT, limiting the bargaining power and leverage that carriers have with their software vendor.

The first problem has been attacked by Microsoft's R&D efforts. Server clustering technology announced in January and advances within the operating system's code have given NT a 99.996% availability level, "and this is without the benefit of NT 5.0," which will be released later in 1998, Usher said.

"A percentage of 99.996 is equal to 20 minutes of downtime a year," said Usher. "That's not enough to make people comfortable with using NT to control central offices, but for other systems, it's a very good price/performance level." Microsoft has budgeted $2.6 billion for R&D in 1998, and because NT is the company's strategic server, a large chunk of that money will go toward improving it, he said.

"Certainly, Unix is still much more robust than NT, but NT is catching up-slowly," said Michael Howard, an analyst at San Jose-based Infonetics. "The carriers have absolutely no reason to convert the Unix systems that are in place now until there's a significant economic reason to do so."

The operating system was also hamstrung by the perception that it was a desktop or enterprise system. "NT was held back in its earlier versions by the fear that root kernel of the [operating system] simply wasn't scalable," said Tim Bajarin, president of San Jose-based market research firm Creative Strategies. "Microsoft's done a lot to address those fears, and the gains in telecom reflect that."

Another economic factor for NT's gains in telecom is based on the needs of new competitors. Because of NT's ubiquity in other parts of the computing world, more programmers know NT than Unix, enabling developers to hire from a much broader talent pool.

In 1997, licenses for NT outnumbered licenses for Unix for the first time, evidence of how deeply NT has penetrated enterprise-level computing.

The NT platform also allows vendors to create software more quickly, addressing a vital issue for new competitors: time to market.

A server-based system to monitor call quality created by MiniCom, for example, went from ground zero to a working demonstration model in just two weeks, Usher said.

"The gut feeling is that the new competitors vitally need that speed to market and that flexibility," said Usher. "Larger carriers are more slowly embracing it as well, sometimes because the smaller carriers they acquire use NT."

One might think that merging these newer NT-based operations with the Unix legacy systems of larger carriers might cause a problem, but NT has some interoperability features that help smooth the process, Usher said. "The compone nt object model is now supported on a number of Unix systems, and as we planned from the outset, these NT systems are complementing the Unix-based [operations support systems] that are already in place."

A third factor helping NT's growth is its increasing ability to penetrate the telecom industry.

Companies such as Vertel, Hewlett-Packard, Tandem Computer and Siemens have launched initiatives to use NT in their network management products, building overall confidence in the operating system and helping to pry open the door for smaller vendors with NT-based products.

"People know Hewlett-Packard will not deliver a platform that's not going to be reliable," said Usher. "That in turn helps get the message across that NT is a stable, reliable platform."

Siemens helped illustrate this last year when it agreed to adapt its INXpress platform for intelligent networks, including key SS7 applications, for NT.

"Siemens was the first real public carrier equipment vendor to bless NT Server as sufficiently reliable and robust for the public network," said Hilary Mine, a consultant with Probe Research Inc., Cedar Knolls, N.J. "It's important for Microsoft to get blessings from such companies with reputations for solid carrier-based equipment."

AT&T INTERNATIONAL GATEWAYS TO USE GEOPROBE AT&T will use Inet's GeoProbe operations support system to manage its international gateway sites from a centralized operations center. The system will provide a comprehensive view of the SS7 network, supporting surveillance, monitoring and business applications by capturing and processing data derived from the network. The contract is valued at several million dollars.

HP SPINOFF SPEEDS LNP PERFORMANCE A data manager for boosting the performance of relational databases could enable carriers to conduct local number portability and data mining operations more quickly and efficiently. The 2.0 Main-Memory Data Manager, released this week by Hewlett-Packard spinoff TimesTen, uses a memory-resident architecture to improve performance while using standard SQL interfaces.