After enduring lengthy delays and production date roll-backs, Microsoft big-wigs are now confident the products will launch in November in San Francisco, with an immediate roll out to follow across the rest of the world.
Andy Lees, corporate vice president of server and tools marketing and solutions at Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, said in a keynote address at Microsoft’s TechEd 2005 Europe conference in Amsterdam yesterday that the launch will be a truly global event.
We’ll kick off the availability of these products in San Francisco and carry it through Europe and the rest of world in the following days and weeks, Lees said.
Lees said the three products have been designed to interoperate better in heterogeneous environments. (They) mark a new generation of platforms for connected systems [that] are designed to work better together.
Lees expects to unveil over 20 customers that are currently using the new Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 tools at the official launch.
He also said that Microsoft has already ported over 80 of its internal applications to SQL Server 2005. These are applications that store and analyze multiple terabytes of data, he said, with an eye to pre-empting any lingering scalability concerns that rivals might dig up during the launch.
He also announced two new TPC-H benchmarks for SQL Server 2005 (running on Windows 2003 server) from Unisys Corp and Bull. The Unisys benchmark set a record for a 32 CPU performance in the 1 terabyte category. The Bull benchmark showed record breaking price performance.
All three servers come packed with a laundry list of new and improved features and functionality, which the company will showcase at the special San Francisco launch event this fall. During his TechEd 2005 keynote however Lees chose to focus on interoperability with existing systems.
He highlighted new interoperability standards support in Visual Studio and ASP.NET for WCAG (Web content accessibility guidelines) and XHTML, deeper integration between Visual Studio and the Microsoft Office suite (including Outlook-managed code), and new SQL Server 2000 Office-based Reporting Services packs for Microsoft SharePoint Portal and Axapta applications.
