Windows NT 4 has been a big success. What are the

ingredients that produced this success? PCQ Labs speaks to TS Krishnan, Director

(Enterprise Customer Unit), Microsoft India, to find out.

We did not see much of overt

promotional activity for NT 4, like in the case of Win95. Yet NT has been a big success.

What is Microsoft doing to script this success story? size="2" face="Arial">



With NT Server 4, we are offering huge functionality differences that would appeal to a
lot of users. So we let the world know that NT was there with enhancements over the

previous version. Then we started on marketing the product. You must have seen our

advertising for NT over the last few months.We started building awareness about the

product across the various customer segments. We first started this with road shows and

seminars. Right now, there's a 28-city roadshow going to the B and C cities and towns.

The next step was to get our large partners

to go alongwith us and start endorsing NT. Most software decisions are taken alongwith

that for hardware. Compaq, Digital, Wipro, and HCL have started recommending NT. We had to

get their sales people comfortable with NT. We helped them build back-end infrastructure

in terms of support and installation.

Building our own channel network came next.

They are the people who go to the small and medium organizations. NT delivers enormous

value to such organizations because of ease of implementation, ease of use, and generally

a low overhead compared to say Unix.

The other thing we're doing is going for

large accounts and telling them how they can benefit out of NT. One of the mindsets that

we used to face about 18 to 24 months back were things like NT not being scalable, NT not

being tested etc. The proof that we have made progress is that this issue does not come up

now. On the contrary, I hear that wherever people are recommending Unix or NetWare, they

get asked-Why not NT also? That's a really positive sign for us. We also do some pilot

implementations to gain the customer's confidence. Wherever we have pushed NT, the success

rate has been over 90 percent.

Just touching on one specific

point. You said that your partners talk about NT. Why are they doing it? color="#000000" size="2" face="Arial">



I would say that there are multiple reasons why they're recommending NT. Purely in terms
of performance, especially on Intel platform, NT delivers phenomenal power functionality

and robustness. So it's a very safe recommendation. Second is ease of implementation.

Network implementations are getting more and more complex in terms of WAN connectivity and

interconnectivity with other operating systems. NT lends itself to these complex

implementations without much of a problem. For example, you can make a web server out of

NT with no additional investment. Today, you can start with a simple server and tomorrow

make it into a web server. So there is flexibility. Third is price/performance.

Those are product attributes. What

else are you doing to promote this? face="Arial">



There's a whole package that we are delivering at the backend. It's more of a partnership
initiative. We are hand holding them and investing in building their skills, to make them

confident in NT. Microsoft is investing in this country. That's a huge confidence building

measure vis-a-vis partners because when they recommend NT to customers they know that

there is a Microsoft office nearby to provide them with the support.

How is NT doing in specific

segments like say manufacturing? face="Arial">



NT is kind of cutting across the lines. I'd say that manufacturing is fairly an important
sector. And more often than not where Intel is the server platform of choice, NT becomes

the default choice as the operating system. All vendors, be it SAP or Ramco or BAAN, are

very comfortable recommending NT. Manufacturing is definitely a key segment. With the wide

functionality of NT, it's not just manufacturing, but people are also looking at it for

large email network office automation servers, and so on.

And banking? color="#000000" size="2" face="Arial">



Banking is one area where we have started making inroads, but we haven't made the kind of
inroads that we should, probably because of the lack of applications. Bank purchases are

very tightly integrated to applications, and it's also tightly integrated to the legacy

prevailing in the organization. My assessment is that bank computerization is driven by

the number of branches computerized than the quality of computerization in each branch. So

when the thrust is on numbers, most banks want to pick up existing solutions and use them

in maximum branches without thinking whether that is the right thing, or whether there is

a better option available.

However, we're making significant progress

with new banks that are coming up. Also, we're making progress with some of the smaller

banks which have grown, like Vysya Bank and Centurion Bank. We're also making inroads into

some of the large nationalized banks for specific applications like foreign exchange

management. However, in the next four to eight months, there's going to be a significant

change in the banking market, because we're going to have most of the mainline banking

applications come up on NT. Whether it's TCS or Infosys, or even relatively smaller

players, all are porting their software onto NT. I think that we will be in a position to

dominate the banking market then.

Porting to NT is also giving application

developers the opportunity to upgrade their software, a large part of which was written 4

to 7 years back. Today, if they want to add ATM facilities, or 'any branch banking' or

'anywhere banking' features, NT is giving them the opportunity to do so, because in most

of the cases, they have to write ground up. So they're using NT as an opportunity to

upgrade their software and become current in terms of features and functionality of their

own products.

When it comes to implementation,

particularly for large accounts, what can a buyer expect from Microsoft? What can he

expect from the partners?



We never sell directly. We go and pitch with a partner. Once the customer gives us the
order, and defines the product requirement and back-end services requirement, the partner

picks up the product order, places it to the distributor, and it gets delivered. So the

partner gets the topline and bottomline of the product. Second thing is the services part.

We have a team called Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS). MCS has a very focused charter,

which is that people investing in our technology and products should get the maximum

mileage out of it.

They deliver that in two ways. First, at

the architectural design stage for example somebody says, I want to have a messaging

architecture, so MCS would go and help them do that. Second is in implementation rollout

stage. If somebody has decided to go with NT Exchange then our infrastructure team from

MCS will help them roll it out. When it comes to services after the sale, the partner and

MCS will work together in making sure that the project is implemented. MCS brings in the

core skills and the partner brings in system integration skills. So it's very

complementary. From customer viewpoint, he sees Microsoft people coming in and value

adding because it is Microsoft technology and he sees the partner coming in and doing

systems integration, because they have those skills. Our guys may not know so much about

hardware like routers and bridges. But we know our technology best, and we can optimize

it.

There are various models for doing this. In

some cases MCS does the back ending, while in others, the customer insists and MCS does

project management and front ending, with the partner giving the back-end stuff. Sometimes

it's a joint effort wherein we clearly define the role of MCS and the partner. But in all

the three scenarios, Microsoft is directly involved in the customer seeing value. We are

also sending them information.

We are in the process of putting together a

customer care program so there'll be more back-end communication from us without a sales

person visiting. This will ensure that the customer is getting information from us,

irrespective of whether he is buying products from us in the next one or two months. The

back-end process for this is not yet in great shape. We need to fix that. So the customer

gets pure technical value from Microsoft.

The fourth thing that we have started

offering now is post-sales technical support. We've started a new group called Primary

Response Group in Mumbai. This is a 24 x 7 Microsoft support center. We have support

contract. Now with large customers we can sign PRG contracts, and Microsoft will directly

provide post-sales technical support.