All About The Cloud: Microsoft Reaffirms Cloud Computing Commitment

Microsoft has already said it’s “all in” when it comes to cloud computing, and at the All About The Cloud conference on Tuesday the software giant again said it is firing on all cylinders when it comes to the cloud.

“The focus of the company is shifting,” said Doug Hauger, general manager of Microsoft Windows Mobile Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform, during his afternoon keynote.

Hauger emphasized the launch of Azure earlier this year; this week’s pending official release of Microsoft Office 2010, which features cloud-based versions of Office applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint; and myriad other Microsoft offerings.

According to Hauger, Microsoft is moving to ensure all of its products are available in the cloud and on-premise as companies prepare for cloud computing to truly take hold.

And to highlight Microsoft’s commitment, Hauger said the company has invested more than $2 billion in cloud infrastructure, has 30,000 engineers working on cloud services and is offering public and private cloud flexibility and geo-replicated customer data. Meanwhile, Microsoft has achieved SAS 70 and ISO 27001 compliance and is offering uptime guarantees to prove its cloud offerings are up to snuff.

The investment and the drive to capture cloud mindshare with Windows Azure and Office 2010, Hauger said, proves Microsoft is serious about the cloud and that it can attack the five key dimensions of cloud computing head on.

“There are some dimensions of the cloud that have become fairly apparent,” he said. Hauger said those dimensions are:

• The cloud creates opportunities and responsibilities.

• The cloud learns and helps you learn, decide and take action.

• The cloud enhances your social and professional interactions.

• The cloud wants smarter devices.

• The cloud drives server advances that drive the cloud.

Those dimensions, coupled with the down economy forcing companies to pay stronger attention to operational expenses versus capital expenses and accelerate the decision making process, are fueling the drive to the cloud, Hauger said.

And along with those dimensions, the cloud must also support four distinct types of workloads, including on and off workloads, fast growing workloads, unpredictable bursting and predictable bursting to be viable and support the new operations, hardware and application models the cloud introduces, Hauger said.

Overall, Hauger said, cloud computing can accelerate the speed and lower the cost of IT. And Microsoft’s is working to create an ecosystem where that rings true, working with nearly 10,000 SaaS providers and ISVs globally and developing choices beyond .NET to include PHP, Java, Python and others. To succeed in the cloud, Hauger said, Microsoft and any other cloud providers have to offer public clouds, private clouds and hybrid clouds while speaking different programming languages.

“If everything is delivered as a service you have to have a choice,” he said.

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