Peter Christy

Microsoft and the Cloud

The word "Cloud" is a quagmire of disparate and often self-serving definitions. What I'm finally realizing is that (not surprisingly) when you look at a "Cloud" what you see is based on your current business, and without a doubt, IBM, HP, Microsoft, Amazon and Salesforce (for example) all come at this from very different business franchises. Microsoft has a unique perspective because of the breadth of their offerings and the magnitude of existing businesses (e.g., Windows, Office, Windows Server and Server Applications). The underlying "Cloud" technology (dramatic reductions in the cost of running applications from large scale data centers) puts pressure on all these product offerings because of the impact on life cycle economics (if the hardware is much cheaper, the OpEx is increasingly the issue, especially when network-delivery alternatives are increasingly feasible). Microsoft is in a great position to understand all of this with clarity because they have invested heavily in large scale Web properties and understand the options well. In the Analyst Summit Q&A, Bob Muglia described his key epiphany: contrary to Microsoft's historical perspective, software "products" aren't close to finished when released to manufacturing if you consider the cost and complexity imposed on the customer for the installation and periodic upgrade of the offerings. Bob said that he finally understood this from CIO's ("I don't want another damned update, but I love the product!") and because of Microsoft's own experience running products like Exchange and SharePoint as services which forced Microsoft to walk in the customers' shoes. So Microsoft is full bore focused on addressing the issue which can be oversimplified as offering products like Office as a continuously updated offering that you can rent by the month. The outcome isn't necessarily just Web versions of those products, although those now exists both within the Live offering and as part of SharePoint 2010. A full solution will include moving products into a continuous development mode (rather than the periodic major release) and I would imagine a way of having powerful client versions that run on a local device but are managed as a service and upgraded on an ongoing basis. Microsoft is also investing in solutions like InTune — a Cloud based service for PC administration and service. Although it could be thought of as "System Center in the Cloud" in fact Microsoft has implemented it on the Windows Update infrastructure, requiring more time and effort to develop the necessary functionality compared to adapting System Center, but creating an infrastructure that would support a huge scale operation (Windows Update supports hundreds of millions of PC's). I can imagine this evolving to Windows as a service with ongoing evolution. Windows Azure is still one of the most interesting Cloud offerings (if you ask me), and the Web-based versions of Office available today are a great addition to the existing product line, but Muglia made it clear that the impact of the Cloud on Microsoft doesn't stop there.

Microsoft Management Summit 2010

I've been going to these for quite some time and it's fair to say that this business unit is thriving. Microsoft says that 75% of enterprise x86 servers run Windows, and that more than 50% attach to some System Center function (SC is a suite of products; Microsoft prices the suite to be a good deal if you need any two). The management business finished 2009 at more than $1B revenues growing at a very healthy clip. MS says that of all the systems management vendors, only VMware and Microsoft are growing. It seems reasonable to conclude that Systems Center is going to be another of those ubiquitous Microsoft products. One of the more interesting talks was about managing your network with System Center. Microsoft's objectives (for now) aren't as grandiose as the title might suggest. System Center advertising service and application level management with visibility and control down to the bare metal. In this initial phase, SC discovers information about a data center topology and then gathers information about the state of those devices and links. A little bit of information goes a long way in terms of understanding network causality or application or service problems. Microsoft in fact believes based on their large Web property experience that the right way to manage the network is in support of the services, so I doubt this effort will stop short of that, but it will be longer coming. Microsoft also showed an application with only the Web tier running on Azure and the rest in a private data center, with the whole ensemble being managed by System Center. Pretty interesting.

VMforce

VMware and SalesForce just introduced VMforce and interesting blend of VMware's Spring framework with SalesForce's Cloud platform. Once you have authenticated into the Cloud you can drag-and-drop a Spring program from the development environment directly to the Cloud. For applications that leverage what's already in SF and Force.com being able to write programs in Spring is quite powerful. If, as Paul Maritz seems to believe, enterprise Java developers significantly outnumber Windows application developers, this will be a very important step. If the inverse is true then Windows Azure is a much richer program because of all the existing Windows apps, the maturity of the Windows application model and programming tools, and because of some of the other aspects of Azure (SQL data services, the Azure Fabric Controller). Time will tell.

Microsoft PDC Overload

There was an amazing amount of interesting new stuff at Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) in LA last week. Microsoft had cancelled the planned 2007 version because the time wasn't right (PDC is held episodically when major technology introductions are ready) but there was more than enough this time including deep dives into the cloud infrastructure (nee "Red Dog" and now formally Windows Azure), Windows 7 and of course the infamous Oslo.

Windows Azure

Windows Azure is breathtaking in vision and ambition: The idea is simple: create a version of Windows that runs Windows applications in the cloud at unbounded scale. Pioneers of successful Cloud applications and services (e.g. Facebook) all say that scalability is the critical design issue -- if your scalability model isn't right then success will literally kill you. Windows Azure has no less an ambition than enabling scalability while bringing forward the richness and tools in Windows programming. This isn't HotMail warmed over with a new face. Ozzie views the PC, the phone and the Cloud (all running Windows of course) as the three pillars of future applications, with Live Mesh keeping data synchronized among all the participants. Windows Azure builds on the success of Windows as an applications platform. The key question going forward is whether Microsoft can herd the huge and valuable Windows developer community toward Azure. PDC was a loud and strong beginning but only time will tell.