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The second Wednesday Keynote at Parallels Summit was delivered by Dave Wright, worldwide industry director of SaaS ISVs for Microsoft.
One of the interesting aspects of Microsoft launching the Azure cloud, he says, has been the notion among hosts, to a certain extent, that Microsoft is now competing for their business.
Obviously, Microsoft doesn’t think that’s the case. And Wright says that Microsoft sees Cloud Computing (Azure, in this case) as a component of an IT solution.
Cloud computing isn’t going to result in hosting being thrown out any time soon. In fact, while certain workloads are currently very well suited to being placed on the cloud, he says many applications, or parts of applications, are suited to
He doesn’t think any level of services is going to go away. There are still going to be IT outsourcers, app hosting, and managed hosting. But you have to be able to mix and match your own combinations of self-hosted, cloud-hosted and syndicated capabilities.
The role of managed hosting will center on dedicated workloads that can’t move to the cloud. Hosts will integrate cloud platform capacity into broader SLAs. Integration is going to become a core competence for hosts.
If you think it makes sense to partner with a cloud platform provider – and that your business model should be integrating your own hosting capacity with a third-party cloud – then he thinks maybe you should consider integrating with Microsoft.
The argument is that a) Microsoft’s cloud is obviously built to integrate with windows hosting, and with things like Parallels’ software and b) Microsoft is a partner-centric company, as opposed to, say, Google or Amazon.
Basically, he’s describing a host’s role as integrating its own hosting capacity with Azure cloud and with Parallels platform for application hosting.
As far as pitching Azure, he says one of the selling features is the relationship with .NET, so that components of .NET applications work just as well on the cloud as they do on the on-premise hardware. The Azure cloud really is elastic, in the sense that Microsoft isn’t really even acknowledging in this context the existence of, for example, a CPU.
The bottom line is basically that Microsoft’s vision is that the cloud and a hosting provider is a complete solution. Microsoft thinks it provides the best hosting platform, and that it will provide the best cloud. And, because the company is partner-based and focused on hosting, it believes that hosting providers ought to be integrating the cloud into what they’re already offering.
CIOs, he says, would prefer that things like cloud services be provided at a higher level of abstraction than they are currently being offered. And that’s the role of the hosting provider, in Microsoft’s model.
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