Comments on: Is Microsoft Turning Cloud Business into PC Business?

By: Derrick Harris

Derrick Harris — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 19:59:13 +0000

Microsoft’s plan appears to be moving apps into the cloud in one way or another, be it Office Live, BPOS or Azure-hosted services. Whether they’ll do this correctly is another question, but I think preconfigured Azure apps are a unique opportunity.

Regarding competition among platforms, Microsoft’s advantage will come by creating more avenues for adoption. If it continues offering Azure directly, but also can rely on Dell, HP, Fujitsu, Rackspace and any other providers that might buy into Azure Appliances, it has a leg up over providers only selling directly. The big competitor in terms of service-provider-partner numbers would seem to be VMware, but vCloud right now is just an IaaS service.

By: Nandavarapu Kiran

Nandavarapu Kiran — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 09:10:31 +0000

i think appliance makes a lot of sense for Microsoft as well as Service providers like Dell, Fujistu etc.

Also, i think its win win situation for large System Integrators like Wipro, IBM Global Business Services, Infosys, TCS. Accenture too as they hold some of the big enterprises as their clients. By logging into Azure’s Service provider program, they can rake in benefits by providing Private clouds to its large base of customers.

By: gregorykonezny

gregorykonezny — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 18:27:49 +0000

I guess my question around MSFT and its ability to maintain its large market share in IT spend and how Azure impacts that is that there seems to currently be a number of cloud platforms that Azure will compete with including Google, Salesforce, a variety of VMW customers, etc. ^^^Won’t it be more difficult for MSFT to maintain its existing franchise as users/apps move to the cloud?^^^