Microsoft has announced a new push into the business
market, backed by a $500m (£285m) marketing campaign.
Over the next year, the software giant will release a string of
products aimed at improving business productivity, in a move that
will step up Microsoft’s rivalry with IBM for the business
market.
Under its People-Ready drive, Microsoft will introduce products
focusing particularly on integrated communication and
collaboration, mobile working, customer management and enterprise
search, chief executive Steve Ballmer has announced.
The new products, the result of $20bn research and development
over the past three years, would be enabled by integration of the
forthcoming Windows Vista operating system, the Office 2007,
Windows Mobile software and the next version of Exchange
Server.
Marking 20 years since Microsoft became a public company,
Ballmer told an audience of business executives, “People-Ready is a
natural extension of our founding vision of empowering people
through software. Today we take this to the next level by showing
how these tools now work together in new ways to enhance innovation
and drive greater value for business.”
Among the People-Ready offerings outlined by Ballmer, the next
version of Microsoft’s Exchange Server would provide a
speech-enabled unified messaging platform, integrating e-mail, fax
and voicemail in a single inbox for each user, with support for
desktop and mobile devices.