I had the opportunity to attend a session on Microsoft Azure
platform.
Microsoft is a relatively new player in this area, the leaders here are Salesforce, Amazon EC, Google App Engine. Even as others like IBM and Oracle(Sun’s) jump to join the new technology.
Cloud computing is the next big thing in the computing world. The benefits of cloud computing are Optimal /On-demand resource utilization , virtualization, green computing, pay per use and ease of administration ultimately leading to low TCO for the subscribers.Microsoft’s strategy here is Software + Services. Mainly pushing the .NET platform as PaaS and Windows Live, Office Services and others as SaaS.
Currently they don’t offer any Private or in-premise cloud offering which basically means that if you have to use Azure then you have to host your service on the internet rather than the intranet.
The interesting thing here is that they are also offering Windows Live, SQL Services, Office Services and also Dynamics services, out of the box on Azure. Customers or Independent Service Vendors(ISVs) can make use of these and other 3rd party services and also host their own services and can then sell these to others.
Here lies the challenge for ISVs, now MS can itself implement business services on Azure (like they already have CRM services in form of Dynamics) and eat into the share of ISVs, at least for smaller companies.
At least for the time being the big companies will shy away from cloud offerings, since the are concerned about security, have already invested huge sums in bespoke software and have to use the existing investments on hardware; or else they would prefer the entire cloud setup to be at their premise itself.
But cloud computing could be the just the thing for Small and Medium Enterprise. It can help them by drastically cutting costs on Hardware and Other Infrastructure.
As the cloud computing platform matures, we will have more players and even more open source implementations of the cloud like Eucalyptus will come into picture and will force players like Microsoft to offer private cloud implementations, and enterprises can even have the option of a private cloud.
Since cloud standards are not open and standardised yet they could face trouble in migrating from a 3rd party cloud to a private/open source cloud hence Vendor lock-in is surely another major concern along with latency and possible security issues.
But now that cloud computing is already past the peak of inflated expectations on the Gartner Hype cycle, it will hopefully have fruitful role to play in the future of enterprise computing.
