Microsoft Optimization – an Introduction

One big focus areas for Microsoft as noted at last week’s MS Partner Conference in Houston is Microsoft Optimization. Renamed from Infrastructure Optimization, MO is clearly something big for MS. It’s got it’s own landing page: http://www.microsoft.com/optimization and there’s a growing body of material to support MO.

In effect, MO is an attempt by Microsoft at an IT maturity model which assess an organisation’s IT systems and provides guidance in how to make it better (i.e. to optomise it!). The basic concepts of MO are not new, but MS’s focus on them is new, and good news.

In Houston, it seemed like most of Microsoft was talking MO as part of their individual messages. Although, in some cases, the individual messages were immature and lacked depth and substance. But there’s some good thinking going on and I’m sure the messages will improve as MS works out what MO really all means.

Some of the material on MS’s web site is older, and uses earlier naming. The TechNet library site, for example, talks about Infrastructure Optimization. While IO is an important part of MO, MO is more. The term MO is still pretty new, and it’ll take time for MS to get all the documentation updated and fully aligned.

Another observation is that there’s no possibility of community content around the TechNet IO/MO pages. It would make sense for MS to open up these pages for community content and to enable the community to add value to the existing MS content.

I’ll be writing more about MO over the coming weeks. I see MO as something that MS customers should understand on two levels. First, customers will start to hear MO ad part of MS’s approach to selling so understanding what MO is can be helpful if only to understand MS’s latest sales and marketing approach. Second, MO has a lot of great ideas about how to make the most our of the infrastructure you already have. So ignore the Sales and Marketing fluff and concentrate on the real depth.

If you have views around MO, I’ve posted some questions around MO over on Twitter. I’m @doctordns, come on over and take part in the conversation.

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