Interview with Essentials 2007 Product Manager Rene Garcia
I conducted a short interview with Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007 Product Manager Rene Garcia. Rene works in Redmond as part of the System Center Marketing team.
1) Tell me a bit about yourself; how you got into marketing, previous projects you have managed, favorite technologies, hobbies, etc.
I’ve been in Microsoft for almost 10 years. I spent half of that time in the field doing product marketing for our Server platform. I have a computer engineering background, so mixing marketing and technical content has always been interesting to me. One of my favorite technologies would have to be Windows Server and in particular Active Directory, but overall I follow pretty much every new technology out there in the consumer space.
2) How did you become the Product Manager for Essentials 2007?
After spending 4 years working in Mid-market customer strategy team finding ways to serve this segment better, I decided to move to a product team that had a very laser focused effort in this space and put some of my experience in practice. It’s a unique opportunity to work with a product that is tailored for this segment.
3) Describe your ideal Essentials 2007 customer(s).
The ideal Essentials customer is a company with 50-300 PCs, running mostly a Windows environment, with an IT staff of 2-5 doing every single IT task under the sun and being very reactive. Essentials can let them take control of the plumbing and allow them to focus on driving more value to the business through IT.
4) What is your favorite feature in Essentials 2007 and why?
From a feature perspective, I’d say the software deployment wizard, it takes a traditionally complex task and simplifies it in a 3 step wizard. And I love the console’s integrated “dashboard” look and feel.
5) What has been the most difficult selling point for Essentials 2007?
I think many customers in the Mid-market are not necessarily actively thinking about management as a whole, while they are surviving with manual processes and point solutions, it’s not the most efficient use of their time. The difficulty is in how to reach out to them to tell the ROI story we have with Essentials, given that historically there haven’t been many unified management solutions out there, designed and priced right for this segment.
6) I know you can’t tell us about un-announced products but can you give us a hint of features we may see in the future?
Although we are in early stages of planning our next release and nothing is set in stone, I can tell you what we’ve heard from customers so far. They are mostly interested in continuing the unified theme and integrating areas like security, backup, virtualization management and OS Deployment capabilities. SP1 is our next milestone and we have very good areas of overall improvement, including some feature requests like support for management of machines in a workgroup, there will be more details as we get closer to that release in 1st quarter of next year.
7) Is there anything else you would like to add?
Yes, I’d like to point out the TechNet Forums are an excellent (and free) resource for customers and partners evaluation or running Essentials. We have a dedicated team actively responding to posts in addition to the product team and our MVP community, feedback has been great and I encourage everyone to visit it and try it out.
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