Selling and Supporting Solutions

Developing better products and changing purchasing and licensing terms are fairly standard ways for a company to develop new markets, but the shift from a desktop PC and product-oriented company to an enterprise software vendor requires a more fundamental and wrenching shift for Microsoft: changing how products are developed, sold, and supported.

The enterprise data center sales cycle is much longer than that for other types of customers-while a decision to adopt a new desktop product can be made in months, the decision to adopt a new enterprise application can take years.

Enterprise data centers are particularly averse to frequent or rapid changes to mission-critical software, which conflicts with Microsoft’s focus on 18-month cycles between major updates and frequent intermediate service packs and patches.

Furthermore, installing new software in a data center always involves customizing the configuration to fit the customer’s particular business needs. Enterprise customers generally expect software vendors to offer a wide range of consulting, deployment, and sometimes even client-specific software development services around the basic software product. Microsoft’s partners-corporate and custom developers, integrators, and ISVs-have performed this role in the past, but many enterprises are uncomfortable with this arms-length relationship with a major vendor. Enterprise vendors, such as IBM, Oracle, and SAP, typically provide direct support for applications they sell to large customers.