Q&A: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer On Sharepoint 2010

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took the stage at the company's 2009 SharePoint conference in Las Vegas to talk up new directions and new features of SharePoint 2010, including more opportunities for end users to develop applications in SharePoint, the use of SharePoint as a customer-facing Web front end, and a continued push to deliver SharePoint as a service.

SharePoint 2010 will go into beta in November. The production version is expected to hit the market in the first half of next year.

After his keynote, Ballmer spoke with InformationWeek by phone.

InformationWeek: Why is the company taking SharePoint 2010 down the path of an Internet-facing Web publishing platform?

Steve Ballmer: Well, we have a lot of interest from customers in going down that path. It turns out that for many Internet-facing Web sites, not all of them, but for many Internet-facing Web sites, and not even for all capabilities on all of them, we see a lot of interest in customers in having a very rapid application, agile, collaborative-style platform that lets them connect people and information. And SharePoint, in a sense then, is as well situated for those kinds of Internet-facing Web sites as it is for the intranet world.

InformationWeek: Are there specific kinds of Internet sites you see as ideal for SharePoint as a platform?

Steve Ballmer: Any application in which things are going to be pretty dynamic, where there's going to be a need in a lightweight way to change the workflows and the applications in which end users -- think marketers or customer support people as a good example -- are going to be a regular part of the publishing environment. I think SharePoint has a real role to play as a standardized infrastructure to go get that done.

If you're saying, would you build the next generation backend store for a retailer on SharePoint, you might put SharePoint on the front end, the backend undoubtedly will be built on hopefully Windows Servers, or some competing operating system, and SQL Server, or some competing database. But, the actual front end and the presentation environment, the collaboration environment, and the publishing environment for the marketing, sales, and merchandising people, SharePoint does a very good job for those functions.

InformationWeek: So, it's an opportunity for marketing, sales, and others to get more of a hand in actually publishing to the Web.

Steve Ballmer: Yes, to get that in a way I mean, in a sense it's a great bridge. IT staffers have a bit of a desire to be in the middle of the picture and provide a level of information security and governance and control, and end users -- marketing, sales, customer service people -- desire to move things along quickly, and without necessarily on every transaction having IT involved. And SharePoint is a great bridge for that. InformationWeek: Is that something that you'd say that SharePoint 2010 can let customers do that they couldn't do today with competing tools for building Web sites?

Steve Ballmer: Well, you can do anything with anything, the truth is. The question is: how much work is it? Anybody can create an environment for a specific purpose that will allow the same kinds of things to happen. But, what we're trying to do is essentially give the people who build these sites a higher-level set of tools, so they're not sort of recrafting and reinventing the wheel. It's not like you can't write your own blog or wiki infrastructure. It's not that you can't write your own content management infrastructure, and lots of people do. And lots of people have templates that run on top of things like ASP.net and PHP and the like.

The question is, can we move that up and provide a little more standardized higher-level infrastructure, that ties in and lets the end user participate, and is done in a very high-quality, finished way for those folks. And we think the answer is yes, and companies like Kraft and Volvo and many others seem to agree with us.

InformationWeek: One complaint that we hear from our readers about SharePoint is the viral growth that sometimes happens without IT oversight. Is Microsoft taking steps in the next version to help IT keep SharePoint sites from getting out of control?

Steve Ballmer: We're moving things along on all dimensions, and certainly helping IT do the job they need to do on information assurance is one of the top priorities, but we're not holding things back from the other audiences either.

InformationWeek: You've said that SharePoint is the missing link between personal productivity and line-of-business apps. Can you clarify that a bit?

Steve Ballmer: Yes, particularly if you had looked at some of the demonstrations that we did today, we're taking information that comes basically right out of a line-of-business app, pumping it into Outlook. Take the following example. The number one frustration I hear from CEOs about IT is they spend a lot of money, yes, but the bigger frustration is, hey, I still can't get answers to my questions.

Getting answers to people's questions is some part end-user interface, it's some part enterprise search, it's some part business intelligence. If somebody says to you, hey, look, I really want to see profitability by customer by year, what they're really saying is, do a search, get access to business data, bring it back, somehow put it in a form where it's usable, pump it into an Excel spreadsheet, and let me look at it. That happens a lot. And so there's a presentation or a portal aspect. There's a BI aspect. There's kind of an Excel aspect. There's a BCS, business connectivity services aspect. So somehow the union of line of business meets Excel meets SharePoint.

InformationWeek: Do you see SharePoint then as sort of being the linchpin for Microsoft in the enterprise going forward?

Steve Ballmer: It will be another important linchpin. I mean, there are certainly things it doesn't do. I'm not going to try to tell you it does everything. But when it comes to end-user collaboration, end-user compositing, and mash-ups, rapid application deployment, information publishing, and content management, I see it as pretty fundamental. If you say, hey, look, when it comes time to writing a policy management application inside an insurance company, it has a role. But things like Windows and SQL Server probably have the bigger role, and SharePoint has a supporting role.

But in a sense, when it comes down to applications, the sort of big muscles for us are Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint, in some high-end application scenarios BizTalk, and then of course the development tools. But that becomes the basket at the server end, and then of course Office with its integration with all of this on the front end; Office in the browser. InformationWeek: You're also positioning SharePoint 2010 as a full-fledged content management system.

Steve Ballmer: Full-fledged. It is a more complete content management solution than ever before, and a higher percentage of all content management applications, I think, will move to it. And, yes, there are third parties that have even higher-end systems, and our goal would be both to continue to compete, but also to collaborate, so that hopefully they'll build their high-end capabilities in a way that they are extensions to the SharePoint offer.

InformationWeek: You've used collaboration as a lever to move into the content management space. Do you feel like the traditional content manager vendors may have missed an opportunity to do the reverse, using their content management systems as a platform to build a collaboration tool?

Steve Ballmer: I think it's tough to do the reverse. I think it's tough to start with the high end, and then go into the mainstream. It's tough to start with the narrow and go broad. I think it's easier and more sensible to start with the broad scenarios, and then go deeper, which is kind of what we're doing. So, I don't know whether they missed an opportunity, I think they just had a different orientation.

In a sense, one of the things we always debate inside our company is how much are you trying to build an end-to-end scenario that works, which everybody thinks is great, but that might make it too narrow, versus how much are you trying to build a horizontal capability which can be extended and morphed. And I certainly find advantage, when we get it right, to building broad horizontal capabilities that are extensible and programmable.

InformationWeek: You also talked about the cloud version of SharePoint 2010. Is that going to be available at the same time as the premises version?

Steve Ballmer: Yes.

InformationWeek: Are you concerned that cloud services may cannibalize premises software license revenue?

Steve Ballmer: No.

InformationWeek: Do you think that's a tradeoff?

Steve Ballmer: No. I'm excited that we may be able to offer more value to our customers by offering software plus services in the cloud than we ever could have done on-premises. So, I think if we offer more value, we'll have opportunities to make more money. So, I kind of think that's exciting, not something to be afraid of.

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