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By Peter Galli  |  Posted 2004-04-12 Email Print this article Print
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


But you still need a few of those customers that give you the hundred dollars in an enterprise strategy. Those customers need high touch, dont they? If you have a model that brings you volume at a lower price you can still afford the same kinds investments in customer touch and support. IBM has always been a heavily resourced model for customer touch and support. Well probably never get to where they were, and theyve been declining. We, on the other hand have been increasing. Weve got over five thousand people working in the enterprise. Weve got another four thousand almost consultants working in the enterprise. Weve got almost a thousand high end technical support specialists working in the enterprise. Weve got 10,000 plus people working in the enterprise. Im not going to say thats as many as IBM has, but if you compare us to anybody else who serves enterprise customers—hey, were big guys. Were up there with Oracle. Were up there with SAP. Were up there with Sun. Were in the game.
We know we need to put skin in the game with enterprise customers. The dialogue with customers is about how to put skin in the game. How do you participate with partners if youre not a systems integrator? Do you have the architect I need when I need him? Its a different kind of discussion—as opposed to, Do you have any capability at all? which was the discussion of 5-6 years ago.
Did Microsoft executives call up [officials at investment company] Baystar and direct them towards making an investment in SCO? I actually dont know anything about it myself. I read about Baystar in the newspaper. I get asked about this. I dont have a clue what interactions may have been. I had never heard of Baystar until I read about it in the newspaper. If SCO needs money, theyll have no problem. Theyre a publicly traded company. Their stock price is up. Theres an impression that you might be the moneyman behind the scenes. Of course were not. If we were funding them we would have to disclose. What was disclosed is accurate—we did take an intellectual property license with SCO because we indemnify our customers, which some people and software products dont do. We did take a license, we disclosed that publicly. Theres talk about XP reloaded—in the context of an interim Windows client and perhaps an interim Windows server version before Longhorn. Theres no plan to have an interim version other than the ones you know about: XP SP2, which is very important. It may not have the sexiest name in the world, but that is a tremendously important release. Check out eWEEK.coms Windows Center at http://windows.eweek.com for Microsoft and Windows news, views and analysis. Be sure to add our eWEEK.com Windows news feed to your RSS newsreader or My Yahoo page:  


 
 
 
 
Peter Galli has been a financial/technology reporter for 12 years at leading publications in South Africa, the UK and the US. He has been Investment Editor of South Africa's Business Day Newspaper, the sister publication of the Financial Times of London.

He was also Group Financial Communications Manager for First National Bank, the second largest banking group in South Africa before moving on to become Executive News Editor of Business Report, the largest daily financial newspaper in South Africa, owned by the global Independent Newspapers group.

He was responsible for a national reporting team of 20 based in four bureaus. He also edited and contributed to its weekly technology page, and launched a financial and technology radio service supplying daily news bulletins to the national broadcaster, the South African Broadcasting Corporation, which were then distributed to some 50 radio stations across the country.

He was then transferred to San Francisco as Business Report's U.S. Correspondent to cover Silicon Valley, trade and finance between the US, Europe and emerging markets like South Africa. After serving that role for more than two years, he joined eWeek as a Senior Editor, covering software platforms in August 2000.

He has comprehensively covered Microsoft and its Windows and .Net platforms, as well as the many legal challenges it has faced. He has also focused on Sun Microsystems and its Solaris operating environment, Java and Unix offerings. He covers developments in the open source community, particularly around the Linux kernel and the effects it will have on the enterprise.

He has written extensively about new products for the Linux and Unix platforms, the development of open standards and critically looked at the potential Linux has to offer an alternative operating system and platform to Windows, .Net and Unix-based solutions like Solaris.

His interviews with senior industry executives include Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Linus Torvalds, the original developer of the Linux operating system, Sun CEO Scot McNealy, and Bill Zeitler, a senior vice president at IBM.

For numerous examples of his writing you can search under his name at the eWEEK Website at www.eweek.com.

 
 
 
 
 
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