Microsoft Server President Talks Home Server

Bob Muglia who is president of the Server and Tools Business (STB) at Microsoft gave an interview with CNET on the future of Windows Server products and about the shift to the cloud.

The edited transcript is available for you to read here, but what is of interest to us is what he had to say about Windows Home Server:

Moving from the very top of your product line at HPC Servers to the smallest product, is Home Server still a part of your group?
Muglia: Absolutely. We’ve got a new version coming out later this year of Home Server. We have a new version of Small Business Server, and we even have a new version of Small Business that will be targeted at really focusing on connecting to cloud environments, so enabling small businesses to run their own networking environment, have their own server for things like file and print, but then getting other services such as e-mail and collaboration from the cloud — which we think makes a ton of sense by the way. We’ll continue to build the traditional Small Business Server, which runs Exchange locally, but as (Microsoft Online) continues to provide more and more capabilities at a more attractive price, we think there’s tremendous opportunities for smaller businesses to utilize these cloud services, and we think they’re some of the first move.

Home Server has been out for a while now, and there hasn’t been a sort of major update yet in a while. You have taken some time to think about what is the right use case. I’m curious kind of how your thoughts on what the role of the Home Server is?
Muglia: Well, I think we’re looking at continuing to make it simpler for people. One of the great things about Home Server is it’s a general platform; it’s a general server platform.

We’re doing a lot of stuff in the next version to simplify the expansion of storage and simplify the way the client backup works, and make it easier to publish information out using your Home Server, connecting again to these cloud services. Those are all the sorts of things we’re looking at.

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