Gartner Fellows interview with Ray Ozzie on Cloud Computing

Just over a week ago I was sent the Gartner Fellows Interview With Microsoft's Ray Ozzie on Cloud Computing. It’s a great read with Ray’s usual style of giving intriguing answers to tough questions about Microsoft’s cloud computing strategy. I asked our folks in Redmond if this would be released publicly which it now has been on the link above.

The exec summary is:

Key Findings

• Ozzie's (and thus, Microsoft's) vision of cloud computing emphasizes hybrid enterprise/cloud computing, where organizations choose when and where computing takes place locally versus in cloud-based infrastructure, and emphasizes that the on-premises and cloud-based solutions work seamlessly together.
• As with early encryption issues, Ozzie believes that security and privacy issues will be addressed as the industry matures in a combination of legislative advances, as well as industry cooperation.
• Ozzie's vision for cloud computing includes system infrastructure, an application platform and finished applications being delivered as a service.
• Microsoft is investing in its own data centers because it must in order to provide its consumer-based services. It believes it is helping to lead the industry in providing innovations in data center architectures.
• Ozzie believes the future of cloud computing is in the experience delivered via a browser across multiple devices — mobile, PC and TV-type screens — which is a vision he refers to as "three screens and a cloud."

but for anyone with more than a passing interest in Microsoft’s move to the cloud, it’s worth reading the entire transcript.

3 screens and a cloud is the emerging mantra that I expect we’ll hear much more about at the PDC this week. The third bullet up there in the exec summary also points towards our intention to offer IaaS, PaaS and SaaS cloud offerings.

Before reading this document it’s actually worth a quick look back at Ray’s Services Strategy Memo from 2008 and even more so the leaked Internet Services disruption memo of 2005. Remarkable progress has been made since the first memo and the story is getting much clearer from the second memo. In particular, Ray understood the need for big investment in data centers and that is starting to pay off. He talks a lot about data centers in this Gartner interview. In particular he talks about the notion of scale out using homogenous equipment. It’s a big change from only a few years ago when scale was always considered to be scaling upwards – now with mega scale data centers you can move to a 9-5 rather than 24 x 7 support environment as you have so much redundancy built in you can design for the inevitable hardware failure, as well as adding scale on demand rather than scale up front. It changes the economics of buying “computing capability” massively and it’s why there is so much interest in cloud computing right now. If you’re Ticketmaster.com, it makes a tonne of sense to be able to scale on demand for the launch day of the sale of U2 tickets rather than having to buy hardware just for that day and have it latent for the rest of the year. Plus you can move CAPEX to OPEX.

Ray then goes on to talk about the changes for developers in this era of cloud computing. This will inevitably a huge topic here at PDC and it’s arguably the area where Microsoft can really shine. Taking the millions of developers who can write to the Windows & .net platforms in to the cloud as seamlessly as possible.

Ray talks about security and standards and the topic of relaxing of regulations to allow the cloud era to thrive. It’s a big topic and one that is going to grow in importance as software becomes increasingly part of the fabric of business. When that business is restricted by regulations that were designed for the analog era, the pressure for change will grow hugely.

Finally Ray talks about change in the post Bill Gates era. It’s be interesting to watch from the inside as there is clearly a different style at play which Ray acknowledges.

He’s turning the tanker for sure….and this week is another turn on the wheel.