Windows Azure means business
At the Professional Developers Conference last month, Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia made a series of announcements around Microsoft’s cloud platform that moved us from something of interest to developers to something that I think will catch the attention of CIO’s too. A few things of note
- App Fabric & Project Sydney – bringing cloud and on premises together
- System Center “cloud” on Muglia’s slides
- VM support in Windows Azure
- Dallas – putting public data sets in the cloud with a marketplace and open API’s
We’re now clearly in the Iaas, PaaS and SaaS world as shown on this slide from Bob’s presentation
Then, earlier this week, we announced the creation of the Server & Cloud division which brings Windows Server and Windows Azure under the same roof with the promise of greater synergy between these two products. Here’s what the Azure team blog post said
As SCD, together with our colleagues in Windows Server, we’ll ensure that customers get the full benefit of Microsoft offerings that span Microsoft’s public cloud, on-premises solutions, private clouds, and clouds that our partners host.
What does this all mean? It means that Microsoft now has a full deck of cards on the table around cloud computing - though there is more to come with things like Office Web Apps – and we’re now showing customers that if they prefer to deploy IT capability in the cloud, be it infrastructure, apps they build or services we sell (like Exchange) they can choose to do that. If they’d like to continue on premises, they can choose to do that….and if they’d like a hybrid they can choose to do that. Choice….not something other vendors are really offering. They tend to be all cloud, or all on premises. Of course this runs the risk of being confusing for customers but the reality is, I think it’s the hybrid approach that many customers will take, putting some infrastructure in the cloud or “bursting” to the cloud when they need it during peak times whilst keeping some things like HR systems on premises for the moment. For a CIO and an IT director, that choice gives them plenty of ways to save money or spend in a different way – i.e. on demand vs. up front. It also gives them a way to do things like proofs of concept or short lived projects in a matter of moments as they can dial up and down servers as they need. The elasticity of the cloud is a god send for CIO’s, CFO’s and IT folks.
Fortunately, it’s not just me who thinks this as there have been a number of posts on the web over the last week observing that Azure is ripe for business adoption. CIO magazine talked with Crispin Porter + Bogusky who have been using Azure in anger already and Chevron is eyeing it up.
Network World quoted Ray Valdes, an analyst with Gartner saying “Azure is looking at the second wave" going on to explain that the second wave is “is what happens after raw infrastructure. When companies start moving real systems to the cloud and those systems are hybrid and they have to connect back in significant ways to legacy environments. It's a big challenge and a big opportunity for Microsoft”. The NW article then goes on to call out all of same things I have in the bullets at the start of this post. They quote a financial services firm as saying “We are testing Azure and how it integrates with our corporate network, but we are in the very early stages and we have questions”.
The Network World article does a really great job of walking through all of the components of why Azure is now of interest to business. A much better job than I’m doing here…they close with Valdes saying “Microsoft is actually looking pretty far ahead to the needs of its clients in the cloud arena."
That’s not all though as CRN talks about “Linking The Cloud With Planet Earth” and finally, Tier 1 Research who know an awful lot about the cloud published a piece last week titled “Microsoft Azure exposes enterprise users, new features and plans to go GA in 2010” talking of App Fabric as “the onramp to deploying and managing applications spanning both servers and the cloud” and closed by saying that hybrid clouds that are a mix of on premise and outsourced will be the model most will follow and noted that neither Force.com or Amazon have the capability to offer that mix.
In summary, Azure and Microsoft’s cloud services mean business….and I expect we’ll start to see them show up in a number of enterprise customers pretty soon.