Tag: Microsoft

Cloud Computing – Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts…

When you combine the ever-growing power of devices and the increasing ubiquity of the Web, you come up with a sum that is greater than its parts. Software + Services is that greater sum. It all adds up to a commitment from Microsoft to deliver ever more compelling opportunities and solutions to consumer and business costumers—and to our partners.”

Yesterday, Microsoft announced its “Cloud Computing” offering – Windows Azure.  Azure is essentially a framework, which will allow developers to build a variety of applications which will be hosted live on the Internet. This brings a fundamental shift in today’s computing. Traditionally, software applications were stored on private ‘local’ servers. However, managing servers is a costly business. Even though hardware costs may have come down in recent years. Physical space, storage, licensing, administration and backup costs take up the lion’s share of supporting a modern day computing environment.

Microsoft and other vendors, such as Amazon, Google and SalesForce.com believe consumers and businesses will want to store far more of their data on the servers in its “cloud” of giant data centres around the world, so that it can be accessed anytime, any place and from any device.

Microsoft’s offerings are somewhat different to its competitors, in that Microsoft believes that accessing your data in the cloud requires more than just using a web browser. A hybrid model of using “Software + Services”.  Essentially, this means that you still use some kind of desktop client to manipulate the data stored up in the cloud.

This proposition of cloud computing sounds attractive to businesses for a number of a reasons:

  1. The cost of Internet network bandwidth has significantly reduced, whilst at the same time penetration of broadband has significantly increased worldwide. This means you can access the Internet almost anywhere on earth.
  2. Outsourcing your hardware infrastructure saves businesses serious fixed costs, both in physical space and in hardware. Essentially, you can expense the running costs of your infrastructure. Previously, infrastructure costs were typically attributed to capital expenditure. Cloud Computing will make Finance Directors the world over very happy. Depreciation? What stinking depreciation?

However, there are some big issues to consider too:

  1. Single point of failure. If the cloud hardware goes down, you lose your apps and data.
  2. How secure is the hosting?  Are your apps and data files safe from sabotage and espionage?
  3. Cultural concerns. For some businesses, it is going to be very hard in “letting go”. Businesses have  looked after and managed their data for years. Are CEO’s willing to let  their precious data be managed outside of their own data centres, despite the significant cost savings?

In response to point 3. I think that the concern is easing. Many business already outsource many of their services.  Outsourcing the hardware is a natural progression of that process

But, what about the rest of us? Well, for consumers, there is the prospect of a future where much, if not all of our data and many of our applications could be stored online “in the cloud”. Think about this for a moment. Imagine a world, where our data follows us everywhere. Smaller computer, limited applications, data synced across all of our Internet aware devices?

Over the past decade, the world we live in has been transformed by the Web.  It connects us to nearly everything we do—be it social or economic.  It holds the potential to make the real world smaller, more relevant, more digestible and more personal.  At the same time, the PC has grown phenomenally  in power with rich applications unimaginable just a few years ago.  What were documents and spreadsheets then are now digital photos, videos, music and movies.  And as we edit, organise and store media, the PC has quietly moved from our desks to our laps to our mobile phones and entertainment centres—taking the Web with it each step of the way”.

Microsoft’s Software + Services model is perhaps the logical step in the evolution of computing.  It represents an industry shift toward a design approach that is neither exclusively software-centric nor browser-centric.  By combining the best aspects of software with the best aspects of cloud-based services, Microsoft hope to deliver more compelling solutions for consumers, developers and businesses.  Microsoft envisions a world where rich, highly functional and elegant experiences extend from the PC, to the Web, to the devices we use every day.

“When you combine the ever-growing power of devices and the increasing ubiquity of the Web, you come up with a sum that is greater than its parts.”

Personally, I’m very excited about this computing shift. I’m *almost* ready to put my data in the cloud.

More information can be found at Microsoft’s Azure site and in this technical white paper. Azure’s terms of service can be found here.

Rory Cellan-Jones interviews Steve Ballmer

The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones does a through job of interviewing Ballmer in London yesterday. Ballmer is very frank with his answers to the failed Yahoo bid and how the company is still playing catch up in the search and advertising business.  Ballmer, sounds like he enjoys a good challenge and a fight.  Personally, I think it’s a good thing for the borg. Despite, the public perception, the borg does and is capable of innovating. Through tough times of competition, those who innovate succeed, which is great for the industry and ultimately the consumers and businesses. Microsoft have concentrated their efforts in recent years on the Enterprise, somewhat at the expense of the consumer market.

However, having heard Ballmer speak yesterday, my views on his leadership have changed.  He is an amazing, passionate  and a strong leader with a sound business plan for the future. The question is, whether there is a silver lining in the ‘cloud’ for Microsoft, only time will tell.

Steve Ballmer’s Keynote in London

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer delivered the keynote speech at his company’s London conference “Technologies to Change Your Business: How Customers Are Implementing Tomorrow’s Strategies Today”.
CIO editor, Martin Veitch interviewed Ballmer directly after his keynote.

Veitch: Given the massive investment that corporates are considering, what are the key factors you believe are   now going to drive us into Cloud Computing? Why would we entrust Microsoft with its cloud provision, over other competitors such as Google?

Ballmer: Well, let me take it in a variety of ways. First of all, anytime there is a major disruption you want to make sure you take advantage of it. The book ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’ says “You can’t as a company that’s established miss the next major revolution”.

So we are embracing Software + Services, Cloud Computing as hard as anybody. By the time we finish our Professional Developers Conference this month, I think you’ll have to say that there is nobody out there with as wide a range of Cloud Computing services as Microsoft, including, dare I say it, Google – which has a great search product but, at the end of the day, doesn’t really have much for Enterprise email, productivity, collaboration. They are trying. They are coming to the game. But they are not really there yet.
Even though we are driving disruption, our job has got to be to also give you a clean and straightforward path forward. So you are going to want the PCs that you own, you are going to want to to be able to apply the licences that your already own.

I think we have, and our prices reflect an ability to let you get to the disruptive point easily, from the place you are now financially.

Veitch: Steve, I guess the $64,000 question from a lot of people’s point of view is, is there going to be an Office for the Web, something that really competes head on with Google Docs, Google Apps?
Ballmer: Well, those are not very popular products! I hope that we are not competing head on with those! I hope we actually compete head on with Microsoft Office. If you take a look at it, Google Docs and Spreadsheets have relatively low usage and have not grown over the last six months or so.
There’s a reason. I think what people want is something as rich as Microsoft Office, something that you can ‘click and run’, if you are not at your own desk. Something that is compatible, document-wise with Microsoft Office and something that offers the kind of joint editing capabilities that is nice in Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Will Microsoft Office offer that? Yes! Standby for details in the next month.

Veitch: So, in the backend of Microsoft R&D, are there people beavering away at versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc, that are purely web based? Or, is it always going to be this hybrid?
Ballmer: What does it mean to be purely Web based? Do we want them to be as only as powerful as ‘runs in a browser’? No. We want software that is more powerful than runs in a browser. Does that mean we will not have some neat stuff that does run in the browser? No.

We think you’ll actually want the full power of Word, Excel and PowerPoint – and you’ll want to be able to get that simply. But, if you just happen to be in an Internet cafe kiosk and you want to do some light editing, perhaps we need to have a way to support you in that as well, inside the browser. And for today, that’s going to have to be all the detail I share. Otherwise, we have no drum roll announcement coming up here in a month!

Veitch: There’s a lot of different views on what the ‘cloud’ is going to look like? Will it be a data centre that you have and you own it yourself? Will it belong to Amazon or some other organisation? Maybe you could even franchise it and work with rivals or peers and operate a data centre in that way. What do you think it will look like? Which slice of the pie will be the biggest?

Ballmer: I think before we are done, the answer is ‘Yes’. No, all of those models will need to flourish. I think it would be nuts for me to say that we are going to run all of the world’s data centres. I don’t think that’s practical.
But what we need to do is a build a service that we start running and we have a model for how it can also be implemented and hosted by corporations for themselves, or by other partners.
The service must be a service. If it’s not in our data centre, if it’s in somebody’s else’s, you’ll still want it updated in real time, dynamically. You don’t want it to be like today’s outsourced model – where the outsourcer winds up locked in, and has to embrace the past more than the future.

So, we need to design ‘a service for services’, if you will. That’s kind of the way we are attacking the challenge.
Now, Version 1 that we will announce this month, you’ll think about it as running a Microsoft data centre, sort of like the Amazon model. And yet we know and we’ve talked already with corporations and partners about going beyond it.

That’s why the symmetry between the server and the cloud is important. Because if we bring back the cloud features into the server platform, it’s also possible for any corporation then to go into instance of its own similar services.

Veitch: Now, is this going to be the Microsoft data centre that we’ll be talking to?

Ballmer: On V1 that will be the only alternative, that’s right

Veitch: Are you going to build here [UK] as well?

Ballmer: In V1, our data centre will be the only alternative, where we build data centres up in the air. By, V2 or V3 whether its our data centre or somebody else’s we know we have to have data centres in many, many countries around the globe. Certainly, in this big country we know we need a data centre – whether we run it, or a partner runs it.

Veitch: Why has Microsoft developed Zune?

Ballmer: At the end of the day, one of the big trends is that all content is going digital. And if we don’t have the software and services that are useful, helpful and valuable for the consumption of music and video, we are sort of not really a player.

Now, we built the Zune hardware with the Zune software – and what you’ll see more and more over time is that the Zune software will also be ported to and be more important not just with the hardware but on the PC, on Windows Mobile devices, etc.

Veitch: It seems to me to be a tricky one because Apple is out there, and they have a pretty good product – but also they have this kind of cult following of people who are just going to buy, because it’s Apple. That must be a frustrating thing to compete against.

Ballmer: They may have a cult following in the music business, and we got about 97 percent of PC users using our stuff. 97 percent may not constitute a cult! But I wouldn’t trade that for a cult!

[Update] This interview has been picked up by CIO Magazine.