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Also there is simple navigation being able to search very easily without knowing very confusing names that's something that the Web has but that the file systems of PC do not have. Let's take the best of both of these and that's what Windows DNA is about. What it leads to is a new class of application. Applications that are more flexible to change. Applications that will improve the access of information. Applications that are easy to administer and change. And it has built in scalability.
When I say scalability I don't just mean that they come on a more expensive machine but rather they can automatically take all the advantage of many machines. The scalability is not just limited to the most expensive piece of hardware out there. Let me be very concrete about our message to developers here. We are taking three different levels: storage, business processes and user interface as well as bringing new things to each of those.
For user interface, you have to think about code and pages. Those two should be unified. For business processes, the Web approach and the client approach should be very different, although we should bring them together. Finally in storage, things like file system or Web pages have been a completely separate world from the SQL environment and we need to bring the two together, again using the object oriented approaches.
When we do this, we want to support the mobile network and the connected network. We need to support distributed approaches as well as connected approaches. This is the framework we are creating here. To do this means updating the tools. One key philosophy we have is allowing people to use any computer language they want. That's very important because languages like C, COBOL or BASIC continue to improve. There are a lot of co-authors of these languages. We don't want to tell people to throw that away. We also want to support new languages and there will be many new languages like Java, the newest language and it's an incredible phenomenon. People are very excited about it. But it won't be the last improvement in computer languages and so we need to design the architecture so that as new improvements come along, they are all available to developers as well. Supporting any language is the center of this strategy.
When you write the code, I have been saying, developers don't have to worry about where it's going to execute. I will simply use high level specification to talk about what data or what components you want to interact with, locate it for you and determine where application should run. That requires a much richer platform than ever before. I will take a very specific concept, the concept of transaction. This is a very important concept. The ability to update information and making sure that a set of updates is all done together, so you don't have inconsistent information.
In the past, application has to do a lot of work to manage this transaction capability. That was not built into the operating system. SAP spends over 20% of their development budget doing things like transaction that indeed the platform should do with that. They are very interested to have us take over that so they can spend time on the business specific work that they really believe in. We need to let application talk to each other and transact as an automatic defined capability.
What we are showing here are the three-tier model. The database information up at the top. That can be many different systems, many different systems, many different stores. Finally the different presentation machines down at the bottom. That can be as simple as an Internet browser client with HTML or a full blown PC that's either connected or mobile. In the middle, we have the applications. That's the business logic that is specific to a particular industry or company's requirement. That's the part that developers should be able to spend all their time working on and thinking about without having to write a lot of rude codes and connect to the other systems. It's about distributed application. It's about one architecture and this can work with the existing computers and new computers. All of our tools and all of our work in Windows are aimed at delivering that as a Distributed interNet Application Architecture. That's what DNA stands for. We usually use this three-letter acronym because Distributed interNetArchitecture is quite mouthful.
I've mentioned several times that objects are key part of this. We need more than objects but the object approaches are necessary keys. There has to be a standard of how these objects talk to each other. For all Windows systems, desktop and server, that object standard is called COM. It ties together all of these pieces. I am showing here many of these pieces. The yellow pieces already exist today. The other pieces, the blue pieces, are being filled in as we complete this picture. They are blue, shown in purple here, is this way of objects talking together.
COM will not be the only way that objects talk to each other. But it will be the primary way because it's the only thing that is built into the popular Windows applications. We have gateways out to other approaches, approaches like Cobra and the other ones that are coming along. COM has already has an install base of hundreds and millions of systems and a lot in the industries is selling these COM components. We need to take that and continues to enhance it. We are talking about new enhancement which is called COM Plus that extends back.
I've mentioned that people are going to switch only to PC technology and higher and higher percentage of the new systems will be PC technology. But the bridges out to the existing world are critical to make that easy. For example, the transaction support that's built in the Windows is called MTS, Microsoft Transaction Server. It can work together with the mainframe transaction software, of which the most popular is the IBM CICS. I've already mentioned the bridge out to the object request broker, or ORBs, which is what Cobra is. I've also mentioned the support for standards like SQL are ODBC. This is a very rich integrated member of the computing environment and it makes it easier to write applications when you just take advantage of what's integrated.
What is the timeline for all of these? Today, we know NT. We are shipping version 4.0.In fact, we recently did an update with an option pack with many of the programming elements of NT4.0.There's an update of the Internet Information Server(IIS),moving up to its version 4.0.The Transaction Server has been updated. The Message Queue has been updated. The Distributed COM has been updated. All these fit in with the Internet Explorer version 4.0.The key pieces I am talking about are already here. People can build these Windows DNA applications today, integrating the client paradigms into application services.
The next big milestone will be the shipment of Windows NT5.0. We've already planned to offer the beta product in the first half of next year. We will have the final beta of that product shipped soon after that. It's a major advance bringing in a rich directory which provides better security and much lower cost of ownership. Manageability has been a key theme there and we are very interested to get that part done because it really is a breakthrough in managing systems.
I've mentioned ease in updating software. What NT5.0 does is it takes everything on your PC and it makes sure it keeps a complete copy of that upon server. So you got the speed up to these PCs because the information is almost stored as local. You also get the ability to go mobile because we store locally. Because we also store a copy on the server, the effort to operate your machine or go borrow someone else's machine and do everything you want requires no special activity because the information is up on the server. In fact, if your computer breaks and you get a new one connected it up, as soon as you log in, it will immediately be up and running because we bring down the information off the server. That is what we call intellimirror, the built-in feature to NT5.0.
The final phrase in delivering DNA is the enhancement to COM,COM Plus, and this is where we build in richer services, more connection and automatic component execution. Over the next two years all of these pieces will roll out in not only in Microsoft tools but also other people's tools as well.
One key point to make is that when we talk about sharing data and rich application like this, there needs to be standard. This standard can't just be about data formats that are common to every business. We need to focus on very specific business data type. These vertical formats for things like manufacturing, healthcare, insurance etc, we need object standard using COM for all of these industries. We have initiatives working with key developers to find interchange standards using COM.
I am showing some of these examples here that we've done. There are many more that are under development, e.g. financial services, CAD, process control etc. That's just to make sure when a customer has multiple applications, they can work together and share information.
