Market Analysis: Microsoft is successfully penetrating the enterprise mindset.

Market Analysis: Microsoft is successfully penetrating the enterprise mindset. "A new survey has found that Microsoft is successfully penetrating the enterprise mindset.
A Datamonitor survey of 200 large European enterprises has revealed the extent to which Microsoft [MSFT] has already penetrated the enterprise mindset. Though many still disparage Microsoft's pedigree in this space, the traditional heavyweights really should be worried.
When asked which vendors they would consider for integration projects, a surprisingly high number of the end-users recently surveyed by Datamonitor included Microsoft among their top three. A weighted average of their responses put Microsoft in the lead, just above IBM [IBM]. The results really do highlight the efforts Microsoft has been making to enter, and compete effectively in, the enterprise market.
Microsoft has also made considerable inroads into other areas where the company would not necessarily be expected to be strong. The company's SharePoint Portal is more of a development environment than a traditional enterprise portal offering. But the survey once again indicated Microsoft's improving reputation in the enterprise sector.
In addition to a strong showing in integration and portals, Microsoft also features highly in the areas of mobility and web services. 34% of the enterprises surveyed say that their preferred mobile development environment is the .NET Compact Framework. This was the largest response and shows the extent to which Microsoft has been making progress in this sector.
Though the company's mobile unit continues to make a loss, in targeting the developers, Microsoft is establishing itself in the mobile space. This market is still nascent, though, and the eventual winners are far from decided.
Although the greatest proportion of respondents (39%) indicated that their strategic development environment for web-enabled application development and web services is J2EE, 26% still opted for Microsoft's .NET. In the case of .NET, one of the key reasons for its apparent success is undoubtedly the strength of the Microsoft development environment, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. The company aggressively targeted the developer community in order to penetrate the enterprise segment, and it appears that this tactic has paid dividends.
In the past, Microsoft's efforts to penetrate the enterprise IT market have been less than successful. This appears to be changing rapidly, and the current leaders need to be increasingly vigilant to the threat that Microsoft presents."

(Full post, via Analyst Views)