Microsoft Demos Windows XP Service Pack 2

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March 09, 2004 (2:47 PM EST)

Microsoft gave a rare public demonstration of its eagerly awaited, security-enhanced Windows XP Service Pack 2 at the XChange Solution Provider conference in Nashville, Tenn.

In an XChange world premiere event before several hundred solution providers, Microsoft Technology Specialist Bill Tomlinson touted the security features of the Windows XP Service Pack 2, which features an array of robust new security capabilities and an improved firewall.

"We are committed to solving the security problems," said Tomlinson. "We won't solve it all by ourselves. It is an industrywide issue. We need the help of all the partners industrywide."

Jeffrey Pennett, president of F.I.T. Communications, Land O'Lakes, Fla., said Microsoft has a wave of security issues and vulnerabilities that need to be addressed. "They have to do something," he said. "They are getting hammered left and right."

Linux interest and momentum, meanwhile, is increasing, according to solution providers.

Net Integration Technologies, maker of the Nitix autonomic Linux-based server operating system and turnkey system, was recruiting partners at XChange.

Greg Starr, owner of See-Comm, a New Boston, Texas, solution provider, said he is finding success selling New Integration's Netix Linux turnkey server.

Starr said he is aiming to close a deal for 100 Netix servers for a client thatwill save the customer $2,000 per server with a total savings of $200,000. Besides the cost-savings return on investment, Starr said that there is big savings in the stability and security advantages provided by the Netix product.

Starr has customized the Netix suite by doing a custom video surveillance/auditing application based on mySQL. "That's one of the things that saved us money," said Starr. "We don't have to buy SQL."

Kevin Wueste, the general manager of Microsoft's worldwide partner marketing effort, said Microsoft's Windows XP Service Pack 2 is part of a comprehensive Microsoft strategy aimed at "extending the quality of the security perimeter."

Wueste charged there is not as a strong an initiative to provide security protection through service packs in the Linux community. "How are service packs going into the Linux community with the amount of attacks happening in that space?" Wueste asked. "They are not that interesting to the press if they happen and there are 10 guys here and 10 guys there whose servers go down. Who do you go to to get that service pack?"

In contrast, he said, Microsoft has a "structured delivery system to make sure our customers and our partners are getting exactly the technology they need to drive forward, whereas in that other space it is an unstructured cowboy atmosphere."

Wueste called the Linux bets being placed by partners a "house of cards" that is going to collapse. Wueste maintained that there is not a business model that VARs can feel safe will be still around three years from now. There is not an "infrastructure in place to engage that is healthy," he said. "With the Microsoft solution, we come in and take you from zero to 60, not from minus 100 to zero."

What's more, Wueste said, Microsoft's full suite of products are aimed at providing comprehensive business solutions rather than small, piece-meal applications from Linux that "are unsupported, that sort of look like Windows applications that don't really work."

Wueste said the Linux solutions maybe support an import from a Microsoft classic application 50 percent of the time. "For realtime business situations, the thing we hear from customers and partners is they want the platform and solidity that is there with Microsoft."

Microsoft is also clearly mapping out its future product strategy and road map, which is unavailable from the Linux community, he said. "You have to go to 80,000 community Web sites to figure out what all the (Linux) architects are doing and then maybe put a strategy together," he said. It is impractical for customers and partners to bet on such a model, said Wueste.

Finally, Wueste warned that any applications that are being written by channel partners will be available as open source and not protected as intellectual property.

Article appears courtesy of CRN.