(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Over the course of his long career in IT, Bob Muglia, who heads Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business, sees the cloud “right up there” with the PC and the Internet as the major IT shifts. And while he is not alone in his enthusiasm, it is not without warrant.
In his presentation, “Microsoft’s Cloud Vision and Partner Opportunities,” Muglia notes that while it may be a new a exciting world, Microsoft is about to keep its priorities in check. “Our approach is from page one of our Microsoft playbook,” he said to a crowd of Microsoft hosting partners. “Our approach to working with you will not change… we’re committed very much to doing this together with you.”
Hosting, for instance, was once high-priced, then commoditization dropped prices significantly, and now Google and others are essentially offering that same service for free. And as whatever IT service faces a similar face, Muglia said that Microsoft’s approach to the navigating the cloud marketplace is in many ways the same as what it has done in the past. This strategy is based around understanding market needs, differentiating products, offering competitive pricing, and build a customer base.
With its partners at the core of its strategy, Microsoft has provided a platform for more than 40 hosts, who have created differentiated value using windows server products and the dynamic data center toolkit.
In broad strokes, Muglia sees three major model shifts: the hardware model, the application model, and the operations model. Each provide estimated efficiencies 10 times over those of traditional methods. In Microsoft’s hardware model, it has worked with OEM partners to stock data centers with products that provide highest performance, lowest price, and lowest energy usage. It has also shifted to buying containers — which can hold up to 2,000 servers at greater efficiency than traditional data centers
The new application model is making it easy to package an app in a virtual machine and put it on the cloud, but it also enables existing apps add features such as highly availability and elasticity. Also, legacy applications can be packaged to run on the cloud, and while it won’t necessarily be elastic or highly available, but it’s cheaper to run.
Finally, the new operations model calls for a fundamental shift in how to think about running operations and scaling them. In a traditional model, an operator may have been assigned to about 30 servers, however, this does not work when you’re dealing with a couple hundred thousand servers spread across several data centers. In Muglia’s vision, failures will just be tickets that need to be fixed, not something that affects the operations, and when hardware is replaced, it returns to the environment.
Partners, who Muglia says make $7 or $8 on every dollar Microsoft makes, are going to be key in making this vision a reality. One of the major themes of Microsoft Hosting Summit 2010 is to get partners on-track with Microsoft’s vision — which will shape the cloud services of the future. “We are all-in on the cloud,” Muglia said.
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