Blue skies for Microsoft’s Azure cloud offering
September 20, 2011
Once a cloud market denier, Microsoft has clouded right over in recent years, beginning with a pitch that pushed the hybrid model, which played to its vast on-premise software base.
But last week, CEO Steve Ballmer went all in on cloud, telling a developers’ conference in Los Angeles that Microsoft was "re-imagining" every part of its software empire to run on and through the cloud and that the upcoming Windows 8 was being recast as a cloud OS…
“The private cloud story we have been telling is the path to that. Azure is intended to be a public cloud service that leverages our global infrastructure,’ said Tim Buntel, Windows Azure platform product manager, Microsoft Australia, speaking at the Microsoft Tech.Ed show on the Gold Coast earlier this month.
‘We have content delivery nodes in Australia, in Sydney, but the compute nodes would be in Singapore," he said.
While there may be data sovereignty problems for some Australian customers eyeing of Azure, Mr Buntel said several hundred have swung over, including some local research outfits such as Curtin University, which uses Azure for genome sequencing applications.
"Azure has been quite phenomenally fast in comparison to other cloud solutions like Amazon", said Curtin Biomedical Informatics research fellow Amandeep Sidhu, who uses the Microsoft cloud for high performance compute tasks around genome sequencing.
Mr Buntel said growth in the local Azure market over the last 12 months had been rapid, albeit of a low base.
“From Tech.Ed last year to this one growth has been tremendous. We have exceeded the expectations of the company for growth in Australia," he said.
Last year at Tech.Ed Microsoft was showing off one of its very few Australian Azure customers in the form of share registry outfit Computershare.
Now the stable Azure customer base would number several hundred, according to Mr Buntel. "These are people consuming on a regular basis," he said.
"Most of the success we have seen has been in independent software developers and software-as-a-service start-ups – a lot of small to medium enterprise applications.
"In the larger enterprises you not only start to get questions around data sovereignty but about existing investment in infrastructure," he said.
He said larger outfits find less need to leverage the public cloud, although there was interest from big enterprise in using Azure for departmental applications.
Over the next 12 months Mr Buntel sees more use being made of the message bus capabilities of Azure, especially around logistics.