Over the past several weeks, I've had the opportunity to present interviews with members of the Microsoft Exchange Server team, talking about topics such as the Personal Archives feature of Exchange Server 2010, improvements to unified messaging (UM) and Exchange Online, and the importance of the Exchange ActiveSync protocol. To round out this series, I spoke with Microsoft corporate vice president Rajesh Jha about what the future holds for Exchange Server. Of course, much of this conversation focused on the role Exchange plays in Office 365 and the cloud, but Rajesh also had a lot to say about the importance of listening and responding to the requirements of customers and embracing changes in technology as a way to move the Exchange team forward.
BKW: As corporate vice president of Exchange Server, how much oversight do you have on Exchange Online? What's your role with the online side of things?
Rajesh: With Office 365, that's a fairly deep transition for us. So with Office 365, we had each of the core server engineering teams take accountability for the online version as well as the on-premises version. We believe this is exactly the right thing because the engineers who take our products to the enterprise, whether it be in the cloud or on premises or a combination, should be the same engineering team because that way we can provide a seamless experience for our customers.
I have accountability for Exchange Server, Exchange Online, customers that might be in a hybrid mode. My peers here at Microsoft for Lync and SharePoint and the Office clients—they have the same model where they have accountability in the cloud and they have accountability for on-premises. This is a little different from the way we run the existing BPOS [Business Productivity Online Suite] services where we had a BPOS team that took our enterprise products and hosted them in a multi-tenanted environment for our customers. Going forward with Office 365, the engineering teams have both the servers and the service.
BKW: You hear a lot of numbers about how many Exchange mailboxes are or will be in the cloud versus on premises in 3 years, or 5 years, or whatever. How much attention do you pay to statistics like that? Or is it more the case that Microsoft is driving those numbers by the focus you're giving to putting Exchange in the cloud?
Rajesh: I'd say we don't really focus on the numbers. We focus on what our customers are telling us. And our customers have shown a lot of interest. Not all customers, mind you—different customers at different rates. But they have shown a lot of interest in moving to the cloud for a variety of reasons, whether it be flexibility, whether it be cost-savings, whether it be new features and new functionality. The customer interest is very much there.
Personally, I feel that we'll see different customers move at different speeds. But by and large, in the aggregate, we'll see a lot of customers move to the cloud. We do believe the cloud is a very attractive proposition for many customers. But I'll be the first one to say that it's not going to be the solution for all our customers. We provide choice there. I think we'll see an acceleration in how customers move their IT infrastructures into the cloud.
BKW: What specifically do you think is driving that move?
Rajesh: For small and medium businesses, the cloud provides scalability of skills. For them, it’s hard to attract and retain the right talent to keep their servers running at a high level of functionality and availability, go through the migration process, deployment process. In the cloud, we have Microsoft taking care of all of that for you, and the customers benefit from that. That's what I mean by scalability of skills. For some customers, it's just a cost savings. They get a modern experience, they get a modern infrastructure for collaborations and communications, and it's always up-to-date. They don't have the accountability of actually updating it. They focus on their business needs.
For large customers, it comes to both cost savings as well as flexibility. If you acquire another company, it's often more efficient to move these new employees to the cloud rather than to standardize an infrastructure across the new company that you acquired. If I'm from a large company and I have deskless workers that haven't had email before, and I want to give them email, maybe I keep my existing infrastructure on premises, and I choose the cloud as a means to quickly provision a bunch of my deskless workers with the new communications and collaborations.
For some customers, it's just the new set of scenarios that we've enabled with Office 2010, Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010, and Lync 2010. It's a very complete communications and collaboration stack, and by moving to the cloud they're up-to-date with our latest stuff.
BKW: Here's your chance to give us your perfect vision of what Exchange Server will be in the future, whether that's in 5 years, or 10 years, or however far out you think about these things. What do you envision for the Exchange Server of the future?
Rajesh: I think the Exchange engineering team has always done a great job of listening to our customers. I'd like to take a little bit of a tour into our history and use that to inform where we're going to go in the future. You know, Exchange was the first product that built a modern web application with the Ajax programming model. We did that with Outlook Web App. Our ActiveSync protocol today is the de facto industry standard, and we invested in that because we heard from our customers that mobile access, anywhere access, was a big need. We've been invested in adding a bunch of policies around ActiveSync because customers wanted manageability.
Fast forward to 2010, we've added a bunch of flexibility around storage options. Some customers continue to be on SANs, some want to get the cost savings they get from being on direct attached storage and JBODs. When I take a look at our work with Office 365, again, we're listening to our customers—they want choice, but they want the full enterprise platform. If you take just a simple example, look at our deployment record. We've updated that in the past few months after talking to customers who said, "Hey, make it easier for me to move from on prem to the cloud and stay in a hybrid mode." So we've added that capability through the deployment wizard.
I guess what I would say, when I think to the future, these attributes are going to continue to hold for the Exchange team. We want to listen to our customers. We want to give them flexibility. We want to give them the best-of-breed experience on any device, anywhere access. We want to give them world-class manageability. And we want to make it easy for their move to the cloud on their terms. These are the principles that will continue to inform our future investment.