First published on CloudBlogs on Jun, 06 2013
Earlier this week (both
on-stage
and
on this blog
) I commented that “
cloud computing is no longer a spectator sport
“ and that now, more than ever, there are countless reasons to get excited about what your business can do in the cloud.
Whether you’re looking to dramatically scale, dynamically innovate, or any other combination of superlatives – the cloud is the future of business.
To give you an idea of how far the cloud has come, and to what lengths Microsoft is going to support it, consider these developments:
-
76%
of all enterprise apps now run on the cloud-friendly Windows Server platform.
-
Microsoft recently announced the availability of
Windows Azure Infrastructure Services
to make moving apps to the cloud simple.
-
This announcement also featured a commitment to
match Amazon Web Services prices
.
-
We have also recently announced
a new $1 billion investment
in
Windows Azure datacenters
around the world – which includes
$100 million in Asia
. Microsoft is also the first multinational public cloud provider to offer public cloud capacity in China (through a strategic partner in mainland China).
-
Windows Azure continues to rapidly grow – reporting
YoY revenues up 210%
, and a subscriber rate of
1,000 new customers every day
.
-
The growth of Hyper-V has now reached
3x of VMware’s growth
.
-
Microsoft SQL Server is now the most widely used database in the world (
46%
market share), and has
outgrew Oracle by nearly 2x
.
-
In terms of productivity, the cloud-based
Office 365
is now the
faster growing product
in Microsoft’s 38 year history.
-
To further remove barriers to enterprise cloud adoption, Microsoft is now giving more than
half a million MSDN subscribers
free, year-round access to
3 new development servers
to develop and test new apps on Windows Azure (and keep in mind the announcement on Monday during my keynote about
how to win an Aston Martin
from the MSDN team!).
As we all prepare to head back to our companies and make the most of what we’ve learned from each other at TechEd 2013, I want to conclude with four ideas about where IT teams should seriously consider focusing right away:
-
Extending the on-premises fabric to meet the cloud
. In other words, use automation and management to create a more resilient fabric in the datacenter, deploy apps to a public cloud, or – better yet – combine these two approaches.
-
We’ve made it easy for you to tackle big technologies
like cloud-integrated storage or software-defined networking. A unified approach to the datacenter (combined with a rethinking of how you do storage/networking/identity) can make things like multi-tenancy
much
simpler.
-
Leverage automation and self-service
in order to offer your business an array of options for app deployment that is secure and compliant.
-
Manage devices where they live
. With tools like
Windows Intune
you have cloud-based MDM that seamlessly integrates with System Center Configuration Manager. A great example of this at work are the 35,000 unique customers already using Windows Intune.
With areas of emphasis like these, and the power and scale of a modern datacenter, this is a genuinely limitless opportunity for our industry.
