Microsoft: Online services are for businesses, too

Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie has given a peek into some of the online services Microsoft intends to offer to businesses, including single sign-on and network management

Microsoft’s message to developers: Online services aren’t just for consumers.

Microsoft chief technical officer Ray Ozzie on Sunday said the company is creating Internet-delivered services for corporate customers to complement its on-premise software.

Ozzie, speaking at Microsoft’s TechEd 2006 conference for business technology users in Boston, described some of the online services Microsoft intends to offer to businesses, including single sign-on and network management.

While Microsoft has launched consumer-oriented online services, such as Windows Live, until now, it hadn’t fully explained how it sees the trend affecting companies.

Ozzie said that Microsoft’s strategy is to offer a full line of services as an extension to existing client and server software, much in keeping with a notion first described by chairman Bill Gates last fall.

For example, corporate customers could connect a Windows network to a hosted management or security service. Or a sales person could do a single search across her desktop PC, corporate network and the Web at once, Ozzie said.

Full article: ZDNet UK