Microsoft to analysts: consumers are the gateway to cloud, enterprise usage

For all of its recent emphasis on its Surface tablet and the Xbox, Microsoft remains focused on the enterprise, and especially on the cloud—but its consumer offerings are a gateway, Microsoft executives said.

Microsoft chief operating officer Kevin Turner opened Microsoft’s 2013 financial analyst meeting by disclosing that more than 55 percent of Microsoft’s revenue comes from the enterprise, a number that he said Microsoft rarely discloses. Other key executives, such as chief executive Steve Ballmer, are expected later in the meeting's day, which runs until 5 PM PDT.

Wall Street may have hoped that Microsoft would answer some uncomfortable questions, beginning with Microsoft’s unexpected shakeup. In July, Ballmer announced a sweeping reorganization that flattened the corporate structure and placed the company’s key technologies in the spotlight, rather than making the individual products the focus.

In August, however, Ballmer unexpectedly said that he would retire at the end of 12 months, prompting feverish speculation about who would replace him: including Stephen Elop of Nokia, among others.

Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia helped boost Elop’s apparent chances. Unfortunately, Amy Hood, Microsoft’s chief financial officer, introduced the conference by saying that the company would be offering no new updates on the succession process.

Kevin Turner, another candidate to succeed Ballmer, first appeared on stage to present Microsoft’s business strategy and where the company has succeeded. So far, that appears to be in the cloud.

More than 55 percent of Microsoft’s business comes from the enterprise, Turner said, with 20 percent from the consumer market, 19 percent directly from OEMs, and 6 percent from small and medium businesses. Turner said that each field employee generates a total of $2.7 million per employee, a new high.

Microsoft’s Turner also pooh-poohed the negative response from OEM competitors to some of Microsoft’s own hardware plays, like the Surface. Turner referred to the consternation in the OEM channel when Microsoft launched Surface, with OEMs complaining about competition from Microsoft itself.  “We don”t want to make all the devices... but we will make some first-party hardware,” Turner said.

”As a result of having those consumer services, we’re able to deliver world-class business services at scale,” Turner said. "When you think about the opportunity between these two worlds, we know the seams of hardware and software integration.”

Turner also claimed that those OEMs now would claim that those products had improved dramatically.

Turner also took pains to emphasize how Microsoft was winning in the cloud.

Microsoft has 460 million MSN customers, 8 million Xbox Live customers, and Bing fields 4.6 billion queries per month. More than 400 million people use Outlook.com, Turner said, after Microsoft made it “more vibrant” and refreshed it, he said.

In the enterprise, Microsoft should move from a $1.5 billion annual revenue rate with Office 365 this quarter, and “blow that away” later this year, Turner said. Microsoft’s enterprise, public-cloud service in China is the only one of its kind in the world, he said.

In the past year, Microsoft increased deployed users of Office 365 by 350 percent, Turner said.

”Some people have asked, what are you doing with Google in the enterprise?” Turner said. “We’re winning them back, one customer at a time,” and Microsoft sees that accelerating, he said—helped by the fact that “[Microsoft] doesn’t snoop their email or listen in on their Wi-Fi.”

”Microsoft has never been considered a critical-enterprise IT provider,” Turner added. “Today we are. That is the new Microsoft.”

Social media in the enterprise represents a $38 billion opportunity today, Turner said. About 85 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Yammer, while 90 out of the Fortune 100 companies use Microsoft’s enterprise collaboration tool, Lync. Lync is a billion-dollar product; Skype has 320 million users.

Together, Lync, Yammer, Skype, and SharePoint in the enterprise make up a “incredibly compelling story” in the enterprise space, Turner said.

Turner also made a pitch for the upcoming Windows 8.1, and its business features: workplace join, as well as the ability to remotely wipe and clean the device of business data if the employee leaves the company. He also pitched Windows Phone as the smartphone platform of the future.

The Haswell or fourth-generation Core processor from Intel gives Microsoft the capability to have a fanless device on a better platform,” Turner said. That will open up new form factors at new price points, he said, and Microsoft is working hard across with partners to make that happen.

Microsoft has also worked to improve its retail store experience, partnering with 200 Best Buy stores to put Microsoft boutiques within each.  “We have to improve the retail buying experience,” Turner said, referring to early customer reticence to buy PCs using the OS. “It hasn’t been what we liked.”

”The one thing we know about Windows Phone: when people use it, they really really like it,” Turner said. Turner acknowledged that Windows Phone was a distant third behind Android and iOS, but with year-over-year gains like 900 percent in India, the company holds out hope that it will close the gap. Turner talked up its its Nokia acquisition, but also highlighted partners such as Samsung and several Asian partners.

Finally, Turner said that its Xbox Live service has attracted 43 million users, about 40 percent of whom are female.

A power outage then interrupted the meeting. When it returned, Microsoft executives detailed their commitment to Windows RT versions of the Surface tablet.

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Linux kernel luminaries talk enterprise, embedded and why they're coming together

Developing the Linux kernel, according to some of the community's leading lights, is a difficult, complicated process but it's also one that's moving forward at some speed.

The final keynote at this year's LinuxCon North America event featured a panel discussion with Linux creator Linus Torvalds, stable branch maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman, and fellow maintainers Sarah Sharp and Tejun Heo.

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[MORE LINUXCON:Linux evangelists: Every time you build a client-server app, the Internet dies a little bit ]

One of the central issues, the panel agreed, in present-day kernel development is created by the proliferation of Linux-based mobile devices, making the embedded development branch far more important than it had been.

"Embedded today is what enterprise was years ago," said Kroah-Hartman.

Torvalds concurred, citing his own recent workload. "If you look at just the last merge window, most of the actual code was on the embedded side," he said. "That's maybe because the embedded side has all these wild and wacky devices, and most of the kernel code these days is device drivers."

However, while kernel development may still be somewhat divided in this respect, the overlap is becoming more pronounced, according to Kroah-Hartman.

[MORE FROM LINUXCON:Every time you build a client-server app, the Internet dies a little bit]

"All the changes that you make have to work on all the things," he said. "So the enterprise guys didn't care about power management ... but it turned out that other people got power management into the kernel and all the enterprise people said wow, this just saved us a couple million dollars in our data center, thank you!'"

The kernel is still likely to be central to future embedded and mobile development, as well, according to Torvalds.

"The reason Linux runs really well on cell phones is that cell phones grew up," he said. "They're already thousands of times more powerful than the original machine that Linux came to be on."

The pace of change, however, may be starting to slow, as Moore's Law begins to run out of steam. Sharp referenced that in a comment about one of the latest and greatest pieces of modern gadgetry.

"If you look at something like Google Glass, the hardware's really not that advanced," she said. "But what you do with it is very interesting."

The panel lacked the acrimony some predicted after a contentious public spat between Torvalds and Sharp over the former's aggressive and frequently profane tirades this summer. Sharp did reference a need for inclusivity and tolerance in the kernel community, though the subject of general civility wasn't discussed at length.

"I'd like to make sure that our community is inclusive to all people that want to contribute," she said. "Getting more diversity is something I would like to see."

One aspect of kernel development that could aid in bringing in new blood, according to Torvalds, is the diverse nature of the work itself

"There are so many things you can do," he said. "The kernel, in many respects, has more opportunities for new people to come in than any other open-source project."

Email Jon Gold at jgold@nww.com and follow him on Twitter at @NWWJonGold.

Read more about software in Network World's Software section.

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How Social Analytics Can Improve Enterprise IT Efficiency

CIO - Imagine your manager offered to eliminate much of the red tape, bureaucracy and distractions you encounter daily.

Imagine eliminating the hours spent in meetings to discuss the need for more meetings. Imagine your manager were able to distribute the workload more evenly among colleagues, or even recognize the need to hire additional personnel.

Now imagine your manager offered all these things, and all you'd have to do is let him read your email.

Enter the Social Enterprise

That's the promise behind VoloMetrix's Social Enterprise Intelligence, an automated, software-based plugin that extracts data from corporate IT collaboration applications including email, calendars, messaging and various social networks.

VoloMetrix then uses that data to analyze exactly where and how much time, energy and costs are being spent on day-to-day operations and on strategic initiatives.

"Think of it like a 3D networking topography," says VoloMetrix CEO Ryan Fuller. "A general organizational chart is flat -- it shows who reports to whom, but it doesn't show who's collaborating across departments and divisions and with whom, who's working together on certain projects, the dependencies and the connections. This is a great source of untapped data," Fuller says.

CIOs and other C-level executives have plenty of access to data "after the fact," says Fuller, in the form of financial and revenue metrics, call center logs and data, and customer tracking through CRM systems. However, it's difficult to gain real-time insight into how employees are connected, how resources are being used and how time is being spent.

Social Analytics: A New Form of Business Intelligence

"This kind of enterprise social analytics technology is a hot commodity right now as enterprises look for new ways to leverage these social connections for business," says Glenn O'Donnell, principal analyst, Infrastructure and Operations Professionals at Forrester Research.

"They already see value in Facebook, LinkedIn, even Twitter's proprietary algorithms that can see connections and then infer what people are interested in, can see how they're connected with other folks, and make sense of your network," O'Donnell says.

Using social analytics on previously unused data sets -- reading email headers, calendar data, instant messaging logs -- can deliver a lot of business value, especially for large, distributed enterprises that aren't on a first-name basis with most of their employees, he says.

"If you're a small organization, everyone's already intimately involved with each other and those connections are well-known. There's really no need to track who's interacting with whom, how often and why, because chances are, you already know all too well," O'Donnell says.

"But in a large organization," O'Donnell says, "It's really important to map who is connected, how intimately, what they're working on and to what extent. This is where the value is -- resource allocation, time management, asset utilization."

Though it looks like a piece of abstract art, this enterprise sociograph is actually showing concrete connections and collaborations between employees. Each color represents an initiative, vendor or customer. And each line represents an instance of employee engagement with that particular initiative, vendor or customer.

VoloMetrix is designed to let managers and decision makers customize an organizational chart, strategic initiatives and customers to provide a unique, custom-tailored, weekly or monthly report that details how much time employees are spending in meetings, handling customers, dealing with administrative processes, Fuller says. "It's a way to see how many employees are engaging with each customer, and how much time each vendor, project or initiative is taking from your organization to make sure they're not either getting shortchanged or you're not going overboard."

Another Hit on Privacy?

As far as user privacy and confidentiality, VoloMetrix pulls only header-level data, not attachments, email content, contact names, specific calendar data, Fuller says. Privacy and confidentiality policies vary from customer to customer and even from country to country, but the bottom line is that the data streams used are completely anonymous.

"Conspiracy theorists and the uber-paranoid folks will always latch onto the issues of privacy and assert that they're always against this sort of thing," says O'Donnell. "They'll say, sure, the powers-that-be will tell you 'We're not actually reading your email,' but how do you know they aren't actually reading your email?'" O'Donnell said.

In fact, there's no legal expectation of privacy when dealing with corporate data from company owned systems like email, he says.

Fuller says that the solution is less about individual actions than it is a way to aggregate data to better view 'bigger picture' issues.

In fact, in many of VoloMetrix customers' deployments, Fuller says the product has opened the door for managers to better address employee concerns and to better distribute workloads, increasing productivity. (Fuller says VoloMetrix currently has eight-to-10 "very well-known, large, global enterprise customers." However, he added, they do not want to be named.)

Giving Insight Back to Employees

"We found that many CIOs and managers wanted to take this data and give it right back to their employees so they could see where their time and energy is going, and where the distractions, the obstacles to productivity were coming from," Fuller says.

The reports can quickly identify where bottlenecks and pain points are in an organization, and can actually empower employees -- especially junior employees -- to better their situations, he says.

"The more junior you are, the less control you have over where your time goes. Without hard data to back up your complaints, let's face it, often times, it's just brushed off as an employee whining," Fuller says. "But with these kinds of reports, employees can say, 'Look, I really am being pulled in a billion different directions, and let's figure out how to address that so I can be more productive and have better relationships.' It can be very empowering."

In fact, Fuller says, when one customer described VoloMetrix to its approximately 8,000 employees and gave them the choice to opt-in or opt-out, only 2 percent (about 160 people) chose not to participate, he says.

CIOs are great at knowing how to allocate IT resources -- storage and networking, software, infrastructure and all the related costs, but this can really help identify more of the "soft" opportunities to redirect energy, personnel and time, Fuller says.

VoloMetrix has almost doubled in size over the last year, Fuller says, and while the company started out aiming for a pretty horizontal customer base, they're now focusing on areas like IT, sales and post-merger integration.

O'Donnell notes that the solution is accessible for almost any large organization, and while it's not exactly plug-and-play, implementing the technology doesn't require a whole lot of up-front investment or highly technical skill sets.

"There's a generic plugins for Microsoft Exchange, but from there, it's so customizable that the skillsets vary insofar as you need to be able to tie it into different systems," O'Donnell says. "Project management, for instance, would require a different skillset than if you were using it to track finance, or sales, so, at the end-user level, each implementation will differ slightly between departments."

Of course, O'Donnell adds, one crucial piece of the puzzle is having a skilled data analyst on hand who can take the data provided, read it and use it to make the business run better and more efficiently. It's best if at least one employee has experience handling and analyzing large data sets, he said.

"CIOs are looking to be strategic enablers for the entire business, and this is a great way to go to their peer executives and say, "We've been providing you these technology tools -- email, messaging, collaboration -- for years, and this is how you're using them, but now we also can give you analytics to better understand how you can use them more effectively," Fuller said. "That's the real business value."

Sharon Florentine covers IT careers and data center topics for CIO.com. Follow Sharon on Twitter @MyShar0na. Email her at sflorentine@cio.com Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline and on Facebook.

Read more about applications in CIO's Applications Drilldown.

This story is reprinted from CIO.com, an online resource for information executives. Story Copyright CXO Media Inc., 2012. All rights reserved.

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Apple and the enterprise: A complicated relationship

When Microsoft shipped Windows 2000 and Active Directory, Apple didn’t really have a solution for identity management or for linking Macs to an enterprise network. The company was just beginning the transition from its classic Mac OS—the first version of which had shipped on the first Mac in 1984—to OS X. Although Apple did ship a public beta of OS X in second half of the year, the final release didn’t arrive until March 2001.

The classic Mac OS was not for multi-user systems. It offered limited user account creation and management for file sharing between Macs, but there was no built-in mechanism for logging into an individual Mac—it booted right to the desktop, where you had full access to the entire file system and all installed software.

Apple did make a couple of attempts to create a multi-user system, however. In the early 1990s, the company shipped At Ease, which provided some multi-user support, first on a single Mac and later for multiple Macs on a network. But At Ease never gained much traction beyond some pockets of the education market for it which it seemed to be designed.

In planning the transition to the true multi-user environment of OS X, Apple added a modicum of multi-user functions in Mac OS 9 that allowed each Mac to support multiple users with basic file permissions, individual user settings and preferences, and limited account-based restrictions. Apple also created Macintosh Manager, which redirected Mac OS 9’s multi-user functions to a server-based data store and copied certain settings and configuration files from that data store to an individual Mac. It wasn’t really an enterprise-grade solution, even when incorporated into the first few releases of OS X Server, but it was a functional pre-OS X stop-gap.

Apple’s first real move toward enterprise functionality, including identity management, came with OS X and OS X Server. The first release of OS X was essentially the Unix-based core of NeXTStep with an Apple-inspired GUI on top of it. NeXT gave OS X solid enterprise bones right away, including support for local and network user accounts.

NeXTStep and the first releases of OS X and OS X Server relied on a proprietary user and client management system known as NetInfo. Functionally, NetInfo served many of the same roles as Active Directory. It allowed for centralized user and computer accounts and user authentication for access to network resources; worked with the file system to support a POSIX permissions model; and it could be used to define user settings and experience in the same way group policies do in Active Directory.

Although NetInfo worked and remained in the mix of Apple’s enterprise components for several years, it had some serious limitations. The biggest one: It was proprietary and didn’t integrate with other platforms.

The other achilles heel for NetInfo in early OS X releases was that it didn’t support directory server replication. That meant that either a single server had to support the enterprise identity functionality for an entire organization or multiple servers—each with a unique directory of users, computers and configuration data—had to be deployed. Even though it was possible for Macs to search for enterprise identity data across multiple servers, the process was far from the multi-master replication capabilities of Active Directory domain controllers.

The proprietary nature of NetInfo led Apple to sell a complete end-to-end solution to enterprise IT. Today, Apple is well known for its end-to-end approach to technology; in many ways, it’s been a winning strategy because it allows Apple to maximize profits and create a controlled ecosystem. It’s also the same strategy that allowed Apple to disrupt industries so effectively and deliver some of the most polished products on the market. iTunes, with its link to the iPod and iOS, is the greatest example of what Apple can achieve using it.

Apple didn’t have a lot of luck selling that end-to-end system to enterprise IT. Part of that was because of the proprietary nature of Apple’s solutions. But the company was also still pulling back from its near collapse in the mid-to-late 1990s. At the time, its market share was abysmally low and it was a complete outlier in virtually every business market.

OS X Panther (and Panther Server) was one of the most important releases of OS X from an enterprise perspective. It rectified the limitations of NetInfo by introducing a broad-based solution for enterprise identity and directory services. It also added support for Active Directory. That represented a major shift in Apple’s strategy, as the company quietly acknowledged it couldn’t succeed in business without really offering support for existing enterprise systems.

Open Directory was technically a collection of directory and identity technologies that included NetInfo support, with a connection for legacy NetInfo server as well as for storing local accounts and records as well as an LDAP-based replacement for NetInfo’s proprietary data store. In practice, Open Directory became synonymous with Apple’s LDAP implementation; as that was integrated with Kerberos, it represented a replacement for NetInfo. In addition to being based on open standards, the Open Directory architecture included support for directory server replication. Even so, it remained a master/slave replication environment that was more like Windows NT’s use of a primary server and one or more backup servers than Active Directory.

Panther was one of the most important OS X releases from an enterprise perspective. It rectified the limitations of NetInfo by introducing a broad-based solution for enterprise identity and directory services.

The scalability advances, which continued to improve in later OS X and OS X Server releases, were only part of the advantage Apple gained by deprecating and eventually discontinuing NetInfo. The other was a move to open standards, including LDAP and Kerberos, the technologies at the foundation of Active Directory. As a result, Apple was able to offer Active Directory integration on Macs running Panther and later releases.

Out of the box the integration was pretty limited. Apple’s Active Directory plug-in for Open Directory only mapped three attributes for user account records (username, password, and home directory), but Apple offered three ways to deepen that integration: extend the Active Directory schema to include the new records and attributes used by Open Directory, map the Apple-defined records and attributes to existing but unused Active Directory counterparts, or use what was called the magic triangle. That involved Macs that were joined to the Active Directory domain for enterprise identity and user authentication and to an Open Directory domain for Mac client management.

Apple also allowed third-party companies to produce their own Open Directory plug-ins to support additional directory types like Novell’s eDirectory or provide new capabilities when using Active Directory. Centrify, an enterprise identity management developer, was one of the first companies to offer more powerful Active Directory integration. Its Direct Control for Mac, which is still on the market, allows Active Directory admins to manage Macs using group policies stored in Active Directory without modifying the schema. Group Policy options are available for virtually every Mac client and user management option available from Apple.

2007 was a big year for Apple. It introduced the iPhone that summer and it OS X Leopard that fall. Leopard was among the most feature-packed OS X releases to come out of Apple and boasted more than 300 features and improvements. The most notable enterprise identity change in Leopard was that Apple finally phased out NetInfo, which was until then still used for storing local user accounts on Macs.

Leopard Server, on the other hand, included key features that would eventually determine Apple’s current place in the enterprise. The first was a new option for joining Macs and Mac servers to an Active Directory domain. To streamline Mac integration with Active Directory, Apple created a new type of Open Directory mechanism known as augmented records. It essentially simplified the magic triangle approach. A user’s Active Directory data still managed his or her enterprise identity and authentication, but Leopard Server could automatically include just the Apple-specified records needed for OS X Server services or client management. Everything else was passed to Active Directory.

This streamlined approach was part of a new form of OS X Server setup and administration. For small organizations or Mac-centric workgroups at a large company, Apple introduced simplified management by way of a new tool called Server Preferences. It allowed users with limited technical skills to set up and manage a server running a subset of the most commonly used business services: file and printer sharing, email and chat, websites and wikis, backup and VPN access.

This approach showed that Apple was willing to work with existing enterprise technologies. Specifically, it showed that Apple was happy to leave enterprise identity in the hands of Active Directory. And it marked one of the first instances of Apple marketing an enterprise product, in this case, Leopard Server, directly to users rather than to IT shops. That approach has been viewed as fueling the success of iOS devices—and the BYOD trend—in business.

Though it wasn’t obvious at the time, Apple was also the beginning to refocus OS X Server as a small business solution rather than an enterprise server OS.

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HP replaces enterprise chief, posts Q3 sales drop

Hewlett-Packard reassigned Enterprise Group chief Dave Donatelli on Wednesday as it reported an 8 percent decline in revenue for its fiscal third quarter, saying all of its major divisions except software brought in less money than a year earlier.

Chief operating officer Bill Veghte will take over the Enterprise Group, which makes the company’s x86 and Itanium servers and its enterprise networking and storage products. Donatelli will take on a new role helping to identify early-stage companies with potentially valuable new technologies, HP said in a press release.

At the same time, the company said it will reassign chief marketing officer Marty Homlish and merge its marketing and communications divisions under Henry Gomez, who is already chief communications officer and will take on the CMO role.

The financial report was gloomy but not unexpected. HP has suffered from declining sales in many of its businesses over the past several quarters.

The pain will continue even longer than HP had expected, according to President and CEO Meg Whitman. Speaking on a conference call about the third-quarter results, she backed away from an earlier forecast of year-over-year revenue growth in fiscal year 2014. Some parts of HP’s business may see such a gain, but the company as a whole is unlikely to turn revenue around that quickly, she said.

Whitman laid some of the blame on poor execution in the enterprise business, which it will be Veghte’s first job to correct. Among other things, the division’s marketing and sales efforts are misaligned with the market, she said.

But in another grim indicator for HP, Whitman said the PC market keeps shrinking.

“The PC market has not stabilized as much as I had anticipated it would,” Whitman said. “That stabilization has yet to occur.”

Despite the lower revenue, HP turned in earnings ahead of its earlier forecast for the quarter. The company earned $0.71 per share, compared with its previously disclosed outlook of 56 cents to 59 cents per share. Not counting one-time items, the company’s profit was 86 cents per share, matching the forecast by analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial. HP’s revenue also met analysts’ expectations.

However, ongoing sales declines continued in the quarter, which ended July 31. The Personal Systems Group suffered the biggest drop, with revenue down 11 percent from a year earlier. Within that division, notebooks were the weakest product category, down 14 percent in terms of units. The business was dragged down most by consumer sales, down 22 percent, while commercial revenue fell only 3 percent.

The Enterprise Group logged 9 percent lower revenue, led downward by Business Critical Systems (BCS), which were down 26 percent. BCS includes servers based on the Itanium processor family.

Printing revenue fell 4 percent, with revenue from supplies going down while hardware unit sales rose. The Enterprise Services and HP Financial Services divisions both posted revenue declines, but the company’s software business logged a revenue gain of 1 percent.

Economic woes across much of the world hurt HP’s ongoing recovery, Whitman said. Europe, the Middle East and Africa remained weak, with HP revenue falling 10 percent, while Asia-Pacific and Japan were mixed, she said. HP’s sales grew in India but fell in China, where the economy appears to be slowing, Whitman said.

However, she said results would be worse without HP’s continued cost-cutting. In the third quarter, another 3,800 employees left the company under an ongoing program to thin the ranks, and HP is on track to cut its workforce by 26,000 as planned by the end of this fiscal year, she said.

“I’m very confident that our turnaround is working,” Whitman said.

The stock market didn’t share her confidence on Wednesday. HP’s shares (NYSE: HPQ) fell 46 cents to $25.38 in regular trading and had plunged another $1.88 in after-hours trading late in the day.

Updated at 4:50 p.m. PT with comments from Meg Whitman.

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Windows 8.1 Enterprise Preview Reflects the Growing Trend of Working Remotely

Microsoft unleashed Windows 8.1 Enterprise Preview today. The early look at the enterprise version of Windows 8.1 follows the release of Windows 8.1 Preview at Microsoft’s BUILD conference last month, and includes a variety of tools that show Microsoft’s commitment to both BYOD and virtualization.

Aside from the slew of changes and enhancements in the regular Windows 8.1 Preview edition, Windows 8.1 Enterprise Preview also includes features uniquely designed for business customers. Windows 8.1 Enterprise Preview adds business-friendly elements like Direct Acess, and BranchCache. It also provides IT admins with the power to configure and lock down the Start screen on Windows 8 clients.

Microsoft also has tools in Windows 8.1 Enterprise Preview to help out with BYOD and virtualization: Windows To Go, and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Windows To Go lets the company put an entire managed Windows 8 desktop environment on a bootable USB thumb drive, and VDI gives the business the tools to enable users to use critical business software from virtually any Internet-connected device.

One of the hottest trends in business technology today is mobility and working remotely. The driving forces behind working remotely are the “bring your own device” (BYOD) trend and virtualization.

More and more companies are embracing BYOD and allowing (or requiring) employees to provide their own PCs and mobile devices. BYOD can be a cost-cutting measure for the company, because the employee is taking on some (or all) of the burden of purchasing the PC. BYOD enables users to be more productive and have higher job satisfaction because they get to use the hardware they prefer, and are more comfortable with.

BYOD also introduces some unique concerns, though, when it comes to enforcing policies and protecting company data. Regardless of its benefits, companies can’t just let employees connect rogue computers to the network, or store sensitive company data on a personal PC without any protection. The nice thing about Windows To Go is that it turns any Windows 7 or Windows 8 device into a managed Windows 8 PC without installing any additional software, or putting the personal applications or data of the employee at risk.

Another factor in working remotely is virtualization. Whether hosted locally or in the cloud, virtual servers allow the company to maximize the value from its investment in hardware, and adapt quickly to changing demand or business needs. From an endpoint perspective, virtual applications, or virtual desktop are more valuable. A virtual desktop infrastructure like in Windows 8.1 Enterprise simplifies deployment and management of software because the company only has to install and maintain it in one place. At the same time, it helps the users get more done even on older or weaker hardware because much of the processing overhead is handled on the server end.

Small and medium businesses have a lot to gain from both BYOD and virtualization. The features and capabilities of Windows 8.1 Enterprise Preview demonstrate Microsoft’s commitment to keeping SMB customers on the cutting edge.

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QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions

Pros Easy-to-understand upgrade for existing QuickBooks users. Generous data capacity. Can work in two company files simultaneously. Pre-defined user roles. Enhanced customizability.

Cons Remote access limited; uses WebEx. No revenue recognition management. Reporting, inventory lacking. Limited global capabilities. Bottom Line QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions represents the top of the QuickBooks desktop software product line. It adds data capacity, more sophisticated inventory management, support for multiple entities, and consolidation to the same feature set, navigational scheme and user interface that's offered in Intuit's other products.

By Kathy Yakal

Anyone who has investigated small business accounting software at all knows the name "QuickBooks." Long the market leader, QuickBooks has won numerous Editors' Choice awards from us, thanks to its usability and a smart set of accounting tools. The software family has been around since the early 90s, when QuickBooks for DOS was launched.

Over the years, the line has grown. QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions is the newest (though it's at least a decade old) member, and the most sophisticated. It looks and works exactly like the more junior versions of QuickBooks, which means it uses simplified language and a clean, attractive user interface and straightforward navigational tools to make accounting more understandable for non-accountants.

QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions, being the very top of the Intuit food chain, adds complexity and capacity in many areas. It's superior to the rest of the line in areas like pricing flexibility, inventory management and reporting. It can track tens of thousands of people, items, accounts, etc., and up to 30 employees can access it simultaneously.

That would imply that QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions can be used by companies large enough to have 30 people working on the financial books at the same time. It's unlikely that the application would be used by such a sizable business, given that it's not scalable; it's rooted to the desktop (unless it's hosted) without the benefit of a lot of comparable add-ons (it can integrate with options in the Intuit App Center, but they're not built to take advantage of midrange solutions, except for Salesforce) and it lacks some of the automation and depth offered by the midrange solutions I reviewed.

Bases Covered
Like Sage 50 Quantum, QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions touches the low end of midrange accounting applications (though it doesn't have inventory management muscle to rival Sage 50 Quantum unless you pay for the Advanced Inventory module). It's gone about as far as it can go in terms of meeting small business bookkeeping needs without overwhelming its target market with too much.

Intuit has, therefore, for the past few years focused on giving users better access to their existing data and streamlining the interface. Its core is a solid double-entry, GAAP-compliant accounting solution, but as it faces the user, it replicates the tasks they were previously doing manually. It maintains a general ledger and provides record and transaction forms for managing accounts payable and receivable, inventory and payroll, and reports.

Because it's a desktop software product, though, it makes those financial chores faster and easier, and the results more accurate. Once you create a customer record using the templates provided, for example, you can insert that data anywhere it's needed—on an invoice, in a collection letter, in a report, etc., without ever having to type it in again. All of the program's individual elements are integrated, and they're designed to accelerate the daily workflow and ensure that accounting rules are followed, warning the user when something isn't being done correctly.

Above and Beyond
QuickBooks Pro and Premier do all of those things. But Enterprise Solutions adds functionality and flexibility to every part of the product. Forms have more custom fields. You can work in two company files simultaneously and create consolidated financial statements. You can do more tasks on a global and/or multi-user level, like change price levels or set defaults, and adjust inventory or change sales tax rates. Pricing levels are far more flexible: You can establish hundreds of them.

Inventory management –always the weakest area in Pro and Premier – is much stronger. You can manage multiple warehouses and always know where your stock is down to the bin level.  Bar code scanning and serial or lot tracking are also available. It supports two costing methods: average cost and FIFO (Sage 50 Quantum and true midrange solutions offer more). QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions also supports connections to ODBC-compliant applications for custom report creation.

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