Stories by: Doug Dineley

We suppose it happens in families too, where one twin seems charmed from the start while the other lives under a shadow. Certainly that's the case with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, the one almost universally heralded and the other widely snubbed. Still, isn't it odd? How do two operating systems, born together and sharing so much DNA, arrive to such different fates?

Bill Gates didn't see much of Steve Ballmer anymore, now that Bill was skipping most of the board meetings. But when they met they'd share a good laugh. After all, although things went pretty much according to plan, they never imagined the company would reach such a peak. Good ol' MSFT was now bigger, in terms of market cap, than any company in the US. If it weren't for the Chinese banks, they'd be kings of the world.

Today in Los Angeles -- and in a "launch wave" of events across the globe -- Microsoft's long-awaited unveiling of Windows Server 2008 (WS08) reaches its dizzying crescendo. At the same time, Microsoft celebrates two other milestones: the release of Visual Studio 2008, which arrived in November, and the forthcoming release of SQL Server 2008, which is due in Q3.

If you curse your "tier-one" IT management solution as too cumbersome, too complex, and too expensive, you're not alone. In arecent Gartner study that declares the "Big Four" -- BMC, CA, HP, and IBM -- increasingly vulnerable to SaaS (software as a service) and open source alternatives, surveyed users gave their vendors mostly C's and D's, and a good number of incompletes.

If Werner Heisenberg had pursued business analytics in the early 21st century instead of quantum physics in the early 20th, he might have struck on a different uncertainty principle: If your analysis and decision-making capabilities don't keep pace with the explosion of critical event data across enterprise networks today, soon you won't know the state of your business, the direction it's heading, or how fast it's getting there.

For managers of enterprise datacenters, the endless stream of security patches from Microsoft, Oracle, and other software vendors (not to mention open source projects) has been a prime source of frustration. For Blue Lane Technologies, it has provided a golden opportunity.

Lots of companies these days are stretching their hardware and energy dollars by consolidating print, file, DNS, and Web servers on virtualization platforms such as VMware. But not many companies boast of running their entire production infrastructure on virtual machines. An exception is Arvato Mobile, a division of Bertelsmann that builds mobile solutions for network operators, media companies, and Internet portals and delivers digital entertainment content to consumers around the globe.