ALKHOBAR, 24 January 2006 — At the end of 2005, Microsoft hosted major launch events across the Kingdom to promote its new SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 in the Saudi markets, bringing the next generation of data management platform and application development tools to organizations in the region. At the launch events developers, IT professionals and business decision-makers learned how Microsoft SQL Server 2005 can help them to connect people, business processes and information, and make better decisions faster.
“Microsoft customers’ demands are changing and there is an opportunity for us to deliver a platform that will better enable people to add more value, gain greater insight and play an even bigger role in the success of their organizations,” said Dr. Khaled Al-Dhaher, GM, Microsoft Arabia. “Through a deeply collaborative development process with our customers and partners, this launch delivers a set of new platform capabilities that offer an unprecedented level of integration between the server infrastructure and development tools and ultimately give people software to help impact business results in a more tangible way.”
The advancements Microsoft is delivering with SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 provide developers and IT professionals with a dependable application platform with underlying support for web services and service orientation capabilities. Furthering Microsoft’s move to more role-specific software, the company emphasized that the expanded set of product offerings are designed to meet the unique requirements of audiences that span from hobbyists and students, through professional developers and IT professionals, to enterprise architects and development teams.
At the launch event Microsoft highlighted the deep integration of Visual Studio Team System with SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006, and showed how together these products help break down the barriers between the architect, tester, developer and project manager to enable better collaboration across distributed environments and speed business-driven software delivery.
“We are offering a range of services that expand on these products and will enable our customers to connect the information across their business so their people can gain deeper insights and obtain faster results,” said Al-Dhaher.
Microsoft also announced several new benchmark results that demonstrate the performance gains that can be made using SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005. The validation from these benchmarks enables customers to better understand the real world scenarios that are supported by these products.
Microsoft’s MEA region includes 85 countries. Chad Hower, as the regional .NET developer adviser, has been traveling to as many of those nations as possible to give presentations and answer questions from customers and developers about SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006. Before coming to the Kingdom, he’d been to Kenya and Mauritius. Lahore, Cairo and Malta were the next stops on his schedule. Hower has the opportunity to see Microsoft products in use in diverse environments and he stated that regionally this latest product launch was going exceptionally well.
“The level of excitement we are seeing is just tremendous. Different groups express their excitement in different ways, of course. In Kenya, the developers were actually jumping up and down on their chairs screaming,” said Hower. “In Saudi Arabia, there’s been a lot more audience participation than we’d normally see at an event like this. When I’ve put forward questions, people haven’t been shy. Everyone has been interested to get into the discussion.”
When asked if the release of the product upgrades was merely to boost Microsoft’s bottomline, Hower replied, “This is not a marketing ploy. There is definitely some meat in these new products. I’m not a marketing guy. My background is purely technical. At these presentations I tend to focus on SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005. Five years ago, I wouldn’t have done both products at one presentation but now they are so integrated. These systems are not just connected. They are completely integrated. To connect means that you can talk but to integrate means that user feels that the systems work together.”
In a redesign of SQL Server, Microsoft has given equal emphasis to development, business analysis and administration. With the ability to execute Visual Basic, Visual C++ and Visual C# code on the new database server, developers can build applications that receive high marks for flexibility, performance and security. Administrators have new tools for tuning performance and automating maintenance. Better views of large data sets can be achieved by developing analysis packages through a Visual Studio-based business intelligence tool set. These improvements do come with a certain amount of added complexity but most IT professionals have taken that in stride.
“As for Visual Studio 2005, it’s all about integration — not just system integration — but how all the roles, manager, developer, tester, etc. on the software development team are integrated,” Hower said. “The product features an expanded set of tools including Visual Studio Team System, an extensible lifecycle tools platform that enables collaboration among software development teams to deliver modern service-oriented solutions. The code enhancements for the developers provide new abilities and tools on the technical side. The bottomline is that Visual Studio 2005 allows development teams to be more productive, obtain faster results and ensure quality throughout the development process.”
In the past, Microsoft has been accused of pricing its products out of reach of most businesses in emerging markets. The company has responded by stating that its pricing is global rather than regional. Perhaps to blunt some of that criticism, to help convince users that licensed is better than pirated and to gain ground in the lucrative SMB market, Microsoft has released several different versions of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005.
Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition is a comprehensive development tool for professional developers working alone or in small teams, priced at $799. Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition is a flexible development tool for part-time or line-of-business application developers building Windows-based, web or mobile applications priced at $299. Then there are several Visual Studio 2005 Express editions: Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition, a lightweight tool for building dynamic websites and web services; Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition; Visual C# 2005 Express Edition; Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition; and Visual J# 2005 Express Edition. These are streamlined programming tools that help beginning programmers learn how to build Windows-based applications, each priced at $49.
SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition is a fully integrated data management and analysis platform for business-critical enterprise applications, with many new features to meet the demands of largescale customers. This edition offers data partitioning, advanced high availability with database mirroring, complex analytic and integration capabilities, adhoc reporting with Report Builder, a database snapshot and complete online and parallel operations. It is available for an eye-popping retail price of $25,000 per processor or $13,500 per server.
“That might seem like a lot, but the customer who buys SQL Server 2005 Enterprise receives everything. With other database vendors not only is their base price more but they charge customers for every little option,” explained Hower. “If you want replication, that’s extra. If you want mirroring that might be extra. Our enterprise customers don’t have to be concerned about such issues. Another cool thing we have is SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, a no-cost, easy-to-use version of SQL Server 2005 designed for building simple data-driven applications. Usually, when you hear about something free it seems like it might be great, but then it’s too restricted to be useful. This isn’t the case with SQL Server 2005 Express. It’s actually the same data base as the Enterprise Edition. A few of the highest-end features such as Business Analysis is not enabled in the Express versions, but otherwise the database core is the same, all of the encryption is there.”
He continued, “A small company might start out with SQL Server 2005 Express and then scale up to the Workgroup or Standard Edition. Express can also be used by larger companies. They can build one big SQL server and then use Express to build little data caches elsewhere. SQL Server 2005 is a product for companies of every size. The key thing is that it’s the same database no matter what edition is being used. Our free edition is not a different version that happens to mimic the enterprise product. If you develop an application against the Express Edition it will run on the Enterprise Edition. For developers, with SQL Server they are assured that all the core features are there in any edition of the product. And companies are assured that as they grow SQL Server will grow with them.”
* * *
(Comments to: [email protected])
