Starting in early September 2008, I took another leap of faith and left Microsoft (again). I’m now Vice President, Product and Program Development for Mural Consulting. Mural Consulting has been around for 3+ years and works with Telco’s, Hoster’s, and ISV’s to transform their business (or at least add to it) to a Software as a Service (SaaS) model.

I’ve been focused on the telecommunication and hosting space since 1999. Much of that time I worked for Microsoft on the Redmond campus. I still remember the days (and oh so many nights) where I defined the Multi-Tenant Active Directory implementation which is still used today by the Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration.

Over the past two years I worked for Microsoft as a Partner Technology Specialist (PTS) focused on helping customers and partners in the Small and Mid-market Business (SMB) space. I specialized in the virtualization space (Hyper-V, App-V, etc.) for the U.S. East Region and led the Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008 launch events.

Over the years I’ve had a pleasure to see the many different solutions and gaps that focus in the SMB space. This includes all of the areas that “should” be a great solution for an SMB, but just not take off because of specific gaps. One such solution area are SaaS based solutions.

Mural Consulting works with Telecommunication, hosting, and Independent Software Vendors to enable them to transition into the SaaS space. This comes in many different forms depending on the needs of the client, where they are in their planning, development, marketing/sales, or support timeline. Mural Consulting offers services targeted towards different teams within the client. For example, there may be an ISV that is looking to transition their software from an on-premise, shrink wrapped, and perpetually licensed software to an on-demand, hosted/cloud, and subscription based service. So how does that ISV make the business model and technology architectural leap from one end of the spectrum to the other? That’s Mural Consulting!

Mural Consulting offers a number of services (business planning, marketing program development, channel development, user experience, software architecture, etc.) enables a client to transition to a SaaS or Software-Plus-Services model and custom fitted to meet their timeline, business, and budget.