Q&A: The greening of business apps

Computerworld - With a dozen years' experience at Microsoft Corp., Satya Nadella has been put in charge of the company's Project Green initiative, which was first announced in 2003. The aim of the project is to rearchitect Microsoft's business application offerings under a common, service-oriented architecture.
In a conversation with Computerworld's Robert Mitchell, Nadella discussed where Project Green stands now, outlined the road map for the initiative -- which he stressed is all about "sequential progress" and not "big-bang deployments" -- and explained Microsoft's take on "loosely coupled" computing. Nadella also described how Microsoft is developing its offerings for midmarket users.

With Microsoft CRM and acquisitions, you have all the elements of a midmarket ERP suite. Is that the plan? We got into this business through a series of acquisitions, and we did some homegrown development, such as Microsoft CRM. We have ERP products, Microsoft CRM and our small-business applications that are part of Microsoft Office. In ERP, we have Great Plains, Axapta, Solomon, Navision -- those are the four major ERP brands for the midmarket.

How will these products evolve? People want things to be simpler, more flexible, and they want to drive down the total cost. But they also want lots of features within a given business domain. To make sense of all this, we first developed what we call the customer model. It has three elements. The first is people. [Users] need a bridge between their ad hoc communications and their more structured, transactional work. The second thing is ... business process complexity as defined by looking at an org chart. The number of people in a department sets the complexity, as opposed to the company size.
The last part is what we call work, or process. People in departments are working on some business process.

How will the move toward a service-oriented architecture affect these programs? We found five horizontal attributes that customers are asking for. The first one is that end users want simpler, task-oriented, role-based user interfaces that will help them navigate through information models they already have. Great Plains or Solomon have a pretty robust data model and object model underneath, but what [the user] is really saying is, "How are you going to help me get to the data I want?"

Satya Nadella of Microsoft Corp.