What new CEO Nadella’s promotion means for Microsoft’s cloud

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Microsoft just appointed its cloud guy to be the company’s next CEO. Satya Nadella has impressively grown Microsoft into being one of the relevant members of the cloud computing industry, but industry watchers say there is a lot more the company must do to grow into one of the dominant companies in the market.

The promotion of Nadella to be the third-ever CEO of the famed technology company is a commitment by the company to its cloud computing platform. Microsoft’s cloud strategy began ambiguously, but has developed into a complete vision even though it sits in the shadows behind some of the behemoths of the industry. Cloud watchers believe Microsoft has an opportunity to be an important and leading cloud computing company, especially for the enterprise market, and it may have selected just the right leader to get itself there…

Nadella – a former Sun employee who later headed R&D, Online Services and most recently served as executive vice president of cloud and enterprise – has been behind’s Microsoft’s transition into becoming a major cloud computing company during the past few years. During its first years Microsoft’s strategy focused on being an application development platform as a service (PaaS) for Windows environments. It wasn’t until a few years into this journey that the company pivoted and announced an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) component to Azure to provide on-demand virtual machine and storage service…

Read more from the source @ http://www.networkworld.com/news/2014/020414-microsoft-nadella-cloud-278411.html

Subscribe to the CloudCow bi-monthly newsletter @ http://eepurl.com/smZeb