Ballmer sights growth and hypes 'breakthrough' tools

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said he believes IT enthusiasm is in a "growth phase" and talked excitedly about Microsoft's 'breakthrough' developer tools, when addressing nearly 11,000 technology professionals at the company's TechEd customer conference on Monday.

"There has never been a more interesting time to be in the information technology industry than right now," Ballmer said. "I guarantee that the impact of the IT industry will be [greater] in the next 10 years than over the last 10."

Ballmer's message highlighted productivity and potential over product features, and he touted the company's latest tools for making developers and administrators more effective.

A new service for automatically updating patches for several Microsoft products will be available in July, he said. The services, called Windows Server Update Services and Microsoft Update, will use a single "update catalogue" to provide regular updates for both consumer and business customers, he explained.

Ballmer touched on four themes during the keynote address: "new work scenarios" made possible by better mobile software; lowering the cost of IT operations; Microsoft's advances in improving security; and applications platforms, including planned updates to Microsoft's tools and server-infrastructure software.

In a demonstration of how work can change with more sophisticated software, Microsoft executives showcased a forthcoming product that will allow an Exchange network administrator to remotely manage information on handheld devices loaded with Windows.

The two products, called Direct Mobile Messaging for Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2, and Messaging and Security Feature Pack for Windows Mobile 5, allow administrators to lay down security policies and load software to remote devices. For example, a company can wipe out the software on a Pocket PC device after three failed login attempts, which might indicate the device is lost or stolen.

Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman said Microsoft's strategy of emphasising packaged solutions over specific features in point products is a defence against competitive products, including the open source operating system Linux.

"Instead of focusing on box features, they're going to be talking more about a distributed infrastructure," Bittman said. "In other words, the way to beat Linux isn't to compare our server versus your server. If you have hundreds or thousands, which will be better managed?"

This week, Microsoft is expected to say that its SQL Server 2005 database and Visual Studio 2005 programming tool will be available in the autumn. The launch of the two development products, which will be released in tandem, has been delayed numerous times.

With the autumn releases of its tools and database, Microsoft will introduce new Express versions of its database and Visual Studio. The Express line will include a new product, called Visual Web Developer, designed specifically for quickly assembling simple websites.

The Express line is an important part of the company's plans to grow the number of Microsoft-aligned developers and compete against open source alternatives.

Ballmer said that the Microsoft development-tools line-up provides alternatives to those of its primary competitors, IBM, Oracle and low-end open source tools.

"This is the year I say, 'Watch out, [IBM] Rational, because I think we have some big breakthroughs'," Ballmer said.

Microsoft's tools targeted at system administrators will improve significantly this year, he said.

Visual Studio 2005 and the forthcoming edition of the company's administration tool, called Microsoft Operations Manager, will support a file format, called Systems Definition Model. That common data format is designed to facilitate the smooth passing of the baton from programmers to operations people who install and run business applications.

Martin LaMonica writes for CNET News.com