Microsoft Simplifies Windows Server Licensing - ' Page 2 ' (
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These changes have a "profound impact" on not only the platform aspects of Windows but also how that extends up the rest of the stack for the Windows Server System family. "This is a significant give; this is innovation in licensing and allows customers to accelerate their adoption of technical innovation," he said.
Data over the past five years has indicated that customers tend to spend some 70 percent of their IT budget maintaining existing systems and just 30 percent on developing new capabilities for their business. "Our job is to shift that model and get it to better than 50-50 so customers can innovate more of their own value proposition to their market by driving out costs from the way they manage and maintain their systems," Kelly said.
Another critical component of the Dynamic Systems Initiative is ISV support for the Virtual Hard Disk Format (VHD), which Microsoft has licensed to the broad community, royalty-free.
The software giant is also announcing this week that a number of ISVs—including Acronis Inc., Akimbi Systems, BMC Software Inc., Consonica, Emulex Corp., Leostream Corp., QLogic Corp., Quest Software Inc., Surgient and XenSource Inc.—have all announced plans to build solutions that integrate with Virtual Server 2005 R2 or support the VHD format.
Microprocessor and hardware manufacturers including Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Dell Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Co., Hitachi Ltd., IBM, Intel Corp., NEC Corp. and Unisys have also committed to developing joint solutions that will help customers successfully implement virtualization solutions and achieve dynamic systems.
"It is extremely important to have one consistent way to do these things, and, at the end of the day, having an open, standardized format for how you do a virtual machine will allow us and customers to have a consistent way to manage both physical and virtual machines, and that is fundamental to how you drive out costs and a key piece of our strategy," Kelly said.
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