If you can't beat 'em, integrate: Microsoft invests in Lindon's Vintela.

• Author: Blodgett, John
• Position: Tech knowledge

MICROSOFT'S ANNUAL COPENHAGEN IT FORUM is a big event for the IT community, attracting thousands of paying tech professionals every year to network with one another and to learn what's new and what to expect from the world of Windows. The morning after the event kicked off in November 2004, the U.K.'s Techworld summed up Bill Gates' keynote address with a characteristic European headline: "Microsoft, Dell and Vintela aim to eat IBM's Lunch."

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The folks from Lindon-based Vintela ate it up.

"It was exciting, what can I say," says Vintela president Dave Wilson, who witnessed Gates' speech firsthand. "We had an expectation set for us that [Gates] goes to some trouble not to name partners because he can get in some deep waters. So when he mentioned our company on no less than four occasions--when you see arguably the most powerful man in the computer industry talking about the value of our products to customers and Microsoft themselves--you've got to feel not just proud, but pumped."

Yes, you heard right: partners. On the opening day of the forum, Vintela, whose software integrates Microsoft Systems Management Server and other Windows products with non-Windows environments such as UNIX and LINUX, could finally announce that it had signed a number of licensing agreements with the software giant, and that Microsoft had, in turn, made a minority investment in the small but growing startup.

Vintela had already had what its CEO Chris Skillings characterizes as a "warm and close" relationship with Microsoft for going on 18 months, since before Vintela was spun out of Center 7, a Lindon-based technology incubator funded by the Canopy Group. He says in some ways the written agreement simply formalizes, for at least the next three years, what has existed all along.

"I know it was very controversial and probably remains so in certain parts of Microsoft--aiding and abetting the enemy," says Skillings, referring to the commingling of Windows with other platforms, "[but] Microsoft is now able to recognize a revenue stream from what they've traditionally looked at as their competition in the enterprise. What we're doing can only help strengthen Microsoft in their own customer base."

Not that Skillings ever considered Vintela the enemy. In the "whole ecosystem" of software companies that he says has sprung up to complement Microsoft products, nine times out of ten those companies operate in a spirit he refers to as "coop-etition."

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