In a recent interview, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Developer Division, Scott Guthrie talked about how Cloud computing with Windows Azure means that your developers can deliver a new kind of value to your business. He highlighted a few key points that, for you as a manager, serve as the business case for getting onboard with Cloud development:

• Developer Value - Having the Cloud as a platform to which you target your applications “means that our developers can really focus on the value”, the unique value that will help drive your business forward.
• True Cost of Applications – 90% of an application’s cost comes from maintenance and management, rather than development effort. By using the Cloud, you reduce those costs, allowing you to build more solutions that add value.
• Capitalizing on Existing Investments – you’re existing investment in the Microsoft stack gives you access to an end to end solution for Cloud based computing. You have the development tools, languages, debuggers, profilers, and runtime. Those gives you the choice to deploy locally to your own data center, to a Windows Azure-based public Cloud infrastructure, or to your private Cloud infrastructure. That is unique to the Microsoft Cloud offering.

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Straight Talk About Windows Azure

On the next episode of the AlignIT Manager Tech Talk (September 8, 2011, 12:00 PM – 12:30 PM EST), Joel Varty, Director of Research and Development at Agility CMS, joins Ruth and I for a straight talk about Windows Azure – the problems that it can solve, the opportunities that it can surface, and the challenges one might face when transitioning design and development teams from traditional development to the Cloud. Joel will share how he worked with his team of architects and developers to get up to speed on Cloud development and their strategy for moving their applications to the Cloud.

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