‘This is an evolution,'” from the mainframe computers of the 1970s, to client-server systems in the 80s, to Web development in the 90s, to cloud services in 2009 and beyond. “But all this stuff still exists. Mainframes are still here today. There are shared pieces of all this together, and you have to take all this into account as you think about cloud services.”
4. For chief information officers and chief technology officers, all of this boils down to four top-of-mind issues that Microsoft is trying to address: portability (hosting data and applications on-site or off), interoperability (putting data storage on Amazon Web Services, say, and computing power on Windows Azure), manageability (everything has to be consistent and coherent), and security (corporate customers have compliance and audit requirements).
3. Cloud customers will trust Microsoft—once the company delivers its product. “What is interesting and a huge opportunity is, [companies] are advancing very quickly into this space,” Hauger said. “We’re very, very early, but people are starting to get educated.” Cost is the key driver, and trust is no longer an issue. “Customers are telling me, ‘There are only one or two companies we’d trust.’ They just want us to get our technology act together and deliver something,” he said. Hauger cited Microsoft’s medical-records platform, HealthVault, as an example of Web privacy and security done right. “We’ve been through that hoop.”
2. Microsoft thinks about its cloud-based products in terms of finished services (like Windows Live or Exchange Online) and a developer platform—and Azure will do both. Hauger described the “four pillars” of Azure as scalable hosting, automated service management, durable storage, and a rich developer experience. The latter will enable engineers to “build applications in a seamless way and publish them in the cloud.” Which all sounds a lot like what Amazon is already doing, which brings me to…
1. What’s special about Azure? In his talk, as I understood it, Hauger hinted that Microsoft’s advantage over Amazon Web Services was the former’s extensive partner ecosystem and its service management. Its differentiator versus Google App Engine is that Azure will be more geared towards big corporate customers and will work with many different programming languages.
“The business model is disruptive,” Hauger said. “The technology is not as disruptive.” When I spoke with him after his talk, he stressed that Azure will provide “complete integration across all platforms.” He also stressed that customers should spend time learning about Amazon’s offerings, and see how Azure measures up. Asked to sum up specifically how Azure will compare with Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine, Hauger said it will combine the best features of both—the infrastructure of Amazon and the scalability of Google—and will work across many different operating systems and programming languages.
The proof, of course, will be in the pudding. Hauger reiterated that Azure is still in its preview stage, where it is gathering feedback from free trials with customers around the world. “We’ll start charging later this year,” he said.
