IT Strategy

Microsoft’s ‘Cloud’ Strategy

July 18, 2008 by Raj Sheelvant

Microsoft announced its “Oslo” strategy last year as part of an overall service oriented architecture (SOA) initiative, but Oslo is about much more than SOA. It is Microsoft’s core modeling technology that will help take Microsoft deep into the cloud. This, according to eWeek’s article Oslo: Road to Microsoft’s Cloud.

Article quotes Steven Martin, senior director of product management in Microsoft’s Connected Systems Divisions (CSD) who says that “Modeling will get you to the cloud and the cloud will get you to the revenue”. Martin says that the future of application development at Microsoft involves modeling and services and will feature analysis and design tools, next-generation declarative languages, process-aware engines and platforms, and self-aware system management. The Microsoft products and tools involved in this will include BizTalk Server 5, BizTalk Services 1, Visual Studio 10, Microsoft System Center 5 and the .NET Framework 4 — all upcoming versions of core Microsoft technology. Martin also says the worlds of web services/SOA, modeling and the cloud are all “vectoring together… In a world where you’re going to have virtualization at the hardware layer and at the application layer, you’re going to have to model.” It sounds like Microsoft is making ‘cloud computing’ as its core growth strategy. In the past it’s used Software+Service as a differentiator from other existing SaaS or PaaS software and infrastructure delivery model.

Cloud computing appeals to the customers but they also recognize that executing that transformation of software architecture from a ‘customized to the internal infrastructure’ to the virtualized SOA is extremely challenging. Hence most of the customers right now are on the side lines when it comes to implementing changes. Microsoft is hoping to capitalize on that ambivalence. Hence, Microsoft intends to provide ‘hand holding’ services for the customers to migrate to ‘cloud’.

Here is the validation of that cloud strategy from Microsoft from the eWeek article – “When people think of services – either on premise or in the cloud – they often have an image in their mind of this very flexible and agile thing,” Martin said. Such as something that is always available and instantly reused by any new application you might want to develop, he said. “But it’s really just the tip of the iceberg,” he added. “Look underneath the waterline, and you will find all of the usual complexity of distributed software -– services are just software after all. They still run in datacenters, have to securely access and cross networks, and need sophisticated infrastructure and tools to manage them, etc.”

I think Microsoft is recognizing that the ‘cloud’ computing is the next phase in automation of enterprise applications and positioning itself to take advantage of this next wave of IT revolution.

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