Q&A: Microsoft's Flessner sounds off on competition
crn.com | at | by Mike
Paul Flessner, senior vice president of Microsoft's Server Platform Division, this week sat down with CRN Editor In Chief Michael Vizard and Industry Editor Barbara Darrow to discuss developments at the software vendor's Tech Ed 2003 conference here as well as competitive challenges from IBM, Linux and Oracle.
CRN: IBM WebSphere has good brand recognition. How can you combat that? Microsoft is still a year away from the full release of Jupiter, its planned e-business integration suite.
FLESSNER: I can only win what I ship. I tell it like it is, but then nobody believes me until they see our integration. The fact is that IBM doesn't expend a lot of engineering energy--at least in R&D--to make those things integrate. They have a big services organization where they make a lot of money integrating that stuff. The reality is, we don't have a big services organization and don't want to make money integrating it. We want to make money on software.