Ray Ozzie Clarifies Microsofts Cloud Computing Intentions

This past week, Ray Ozzie, CTO and CSA at Microsoft, made an interesting presentation to the financial analyst community.  In this outing, he made a great deal clearer MSFT's intentions and inclinations with respect to utility computing.  In the course of the presentation, he identifies the three layers of Microsofts utility offerings to come:  the Global Foundation Services comprising huge data centers running commodity technology, the Cloud Infrastructure Services and the Live Platform (the "application layer" or most easily recognized as SaaS). 

It's the Cloud Infrastructure that interests me.  If, as Ray and others have said, this layer is offered up as "Infrastructure as a Service", it potentially opens a huge door into inexpensive, on-demand computing for IT organizations that depend on Microsoft, as well as OTHER operating systems and applications. The success of such an offer depends, in my view, on the ability of enterprise IT, particularly the small and medium size enterprise that relies so heavily on Microsoft products, to use the IaaS utility as an adjunct resource, providing on-demand resources at extremely low price, with very quick provisioning, and high reliability and resilience.

[Thanks to Isabel Wang for her pointer to the text of the presentation and her analysis.]

MSFT Financial Analyst Meeting: Ray Ozzie

The next layer above that is our cloud infrastructure services layer. And this is the most fundamental software level of the services infrastructure. You can think of this as a utility computing fabric upon which all of our online services run. You know, among other services, this fabric has an efficient and isolated virtualized computation layer. It has application frameworks that support a variety of app models that are designed for horizontal scaling. And it has infrastructure that manages the automatic deployment and load balancing and performance optimization of the apps that it's managing running on its infrastructure.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, IaaS, utility computing

Comments

[Isabel Wang]

While I was reading about the three layers, I kept thinking Ozzie's vision sounds just like Amazon Web Services; nothing new there.

But the main difference is, Microsoft already has a presence within most IT organizations. Today you run MSFT products on premise. Tomorrow (especially if you're short on data center space) you might use the MSFT cloud as an adjunct utility for the same apps. After that (since Ozzie says his computing resources will be really cheap, and your power bill is going up), scaling back your own infrastructure might start seeming like a appealing idea...

Pretty clever, this software + service thing.

[Rich Miller]

My thought exactly. The ability of a "garden variety" data center, running in a small or medium enterprise, to transparently "scale out" by using the MSFT cloud offers some very interesting economics. It really gets interesting when thinking about MSFT utility computing in support of business continuity (e.g. high availability, data backup/archive, disaster recovery), development & test, software update & patch, and even optimization of power consumption. The key will be a seamless, easy to use, easy to manage service offer that allows the extension of the data center into the IaaS service.

If MSFT can bring to market this kind of "service bridge", it will have secured the next 5 years of economic growth for the company. The recipe isn't going to be easy for MSFT in the time allotted. It should, in fact, open up the utility computing market to other, more nimble competitors who can address the SME Microsoft data center.