A visualization of the Windows Azure platform, taken from the Microsoft website.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — With the introduction of Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud computing platform – first revealed as a concept late in 2008 – came much speculation about the company’s larger objectives for the service, as well as many questions, from the hosting community, about where exactly the hosting provider fit into the distribution of the service.
As the official launch of Azure approaches – it is scheduled to land at Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference, which takes place from November 17-19 – the company is making overtures specifically to assure hosting providers that Azure presents an opportunity for them.
In an interview with the WHIR, Microsoft’s (www.microsoft.com) industry director for SaaS ISVs in the communications sector Dave Wright acknowledged that there’s a bit of confusion in the hosting market around the message Microsoft has put out on Azure. In some sectors, the product is being interpreted as a move into the hosting business, which, Wright says, it is not.
Azure, he says, is the platform – operating system and database – as a service, intended to power applications, which can built by Azure users and sold to their customers for whatever price they feel works, as long as they pay Microsoft for the use of the platform. Those users can be software vendors, building their products directly on the platform, but they can also be hosting providers, using Azure as an infrastructure component to power extensions of their own services.
“Hosters, just like traditional ISVs, are likely – and we’ve got some hosters who are probably going to experiment with this in the next few months – to build out control panel integrations, various types of business continuity or cloud storage services, fail-over and disaster recovery capabilities,” he says, “that compliment what they do with their existing dedicated infrastructure, and other types of solutions that integrate Azure into what they do on a regular basis, without actually using Azure to replace that business.”
There is some confusion around Microsoft’s use of the word “resell,” and specifically around how it can be applied to Azure. There is, says Wright, a licensing model that allows for syndicating of Azure login accounts to developers or large enterprises doing development – a model that might appeal to a systems integrator, for instance. But that’s not what Microsoft has in mind for hosting providers. The second licensing model, which Wright says the company has nicknamed “Azure Embedded,” allows for a partner to build a value proposition on top of Azure and sell it at whatever price, and in whatever way, they choose, without Microsoft having any specific knowledge of the end customers.
“So a hoster is free to sell, for example, a control panel that was built on Azure,” says Wright, “or integrate offers that are running on Azure through their own control panel, and the end user might or might not know that Azure was underneath, and Microsoft would not know who that end user was.”
Currently, the product is in a pre-release “community technology preview” stage, available to a limited number of developers, including some hosting providers, who are working on building out solutions on top of the Azure platform. Wright says some of those projects Microsoft is working on with hosting providers will be revealed closer to Azure’s launch at PDC, as examples of what can be accomplished with the platform.
He says the in-development projects are under wraps at the moment for a few reasons – to give their developers a bit of a head start on the competition, or because the more experimental projects might simply not work. But it’s a safe bet that some of the hosting providers working with Azure right now include some of the short list of loyal Microsoft partners who tend to bring the company’s new products to market at or close to launch – NaviSite, MaximumASP, Applied Innovations and a few others announced new products tied to the launch of Microsoft’s WebsiteSpark program this week, for instance.
The other obvious question concerns where a host might expect to lose business to Azure – that is, it stands to reason that an ISV might choose to build its application on Azure rather than deal with a hosting provider at all.
Wright says this is likely only a possibility for the very smallest developers, and that an ISV with an in-market product of any size likely has a more complex infrastructure that absolutely requires some dedicated components. In a case like that, if you’re offering a bare-bones platform-as-a-service product to compliment your dedicated offerings, you might lose that business to Azure, but you’re already in pretty rarified company if you’re in a position to compete with Azure, and are no doubt already competing with similar cloud platforms.
“It’s likely that [ISVs] will find it attractive to build out in a dedicated hosting environment and complement that with some Azure-related capabilities,” he says. “Or they might build out the bulk of their system on Azure and then compliment it with dedicated hosting capabilities. But they will, in most cases, find it valuable to adopt our overall software plus services message, which is that you put your computing power where it makes the most sense, and you link everything together, rather than assuming that everything needs to be in the cloud or everything needs to be in a dedicated provider, or that everything needs to be on-premise.”
A host who chooses to build a value proposition, as Wright says, on top of Azure, will have a single Azure account, and will treat the service as a resource, and a component of its solution – paying for raw consumption based on compute hours, bandwidth and storage. And it would sell the service to customers per-seat, per-month or in whatever pricing model made the most sense to its business.
“What we’re trying to do is let hosters know that we’re not asking them to resell,” he says. “We want them to build on top, build a value proposition on top, or integrate a value proposition with, and then sell to their customers, treating Azure as just another infrastructure component.”
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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