Notes from the Cloud: Oct. 13
Notes from the Cloud is a new series for the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog bringing you a summary of news and blog posts related to Microsoft Online Services, cloud computing, and our competitors published by partners, blog writers, and news sources across our online community.
· InformationWeek’s Mary Hayes Weier writes about Microsoft’s movement toward cloud computing, including an interview with our own Ron Markezich, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Online Services.
In May, 2004, Markezich was Microsoft's CIO, and doing very CIO-type stuff, like overseeing HR and ERP applications, and running the overall IT Infrastructure. That was, until Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer called him into a meeting. They told him there was a major new strategy in place, and his experience in operational IT was critical to make it happen. "They said that the future of the company is not selling a license, but selling our software over the Internet as a service," Markezich recalls.
· More from Mary Hayes Weier in an InformationWeek cover story. Weier writes about the changing attitudes of CIOs toward cloud computing. Bill Louv, GlaxoSmithKline CIO and Microsoft Online Services customer, is quoted in the article:
Louv bristles at any notion that he's chasing a trend. "The evolution here isn't, 'Gee, let's do something in the cloud or SaaS,'" he says. "Our Lotus Notes platform was getting to end of life. The question came up innocently that, given we'll have to spend a lot of money here, is there something we can do that's smarter?" What he decided is to move all 115,000 employees worldwide to the online, monthly subscription Exchange and SharePoint offerings that Microsoft made available in April.
· In another post in the run up to the SharePoint Conference, Oct. 19-22 in Las Vegas, Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President, SharePoint Server, writes about the process of designing and building SharePoint, including this nugget about the impact of SharePoint Online on the engineering process:
In the last couple of posts I mentioned that SharePoint Online is big part of our development cycle. It is a way to reach many new customers. It also gives us a much larger scale environment than our own SharePoint intranet, extranet and internet apps to analyze and tune. This release, we created a dedicated team called “The Grid” team to analyze and optimize in great detail the total costs, time, reliability and other factors of a SharePoint deployment we hope to reach 10s and eventually 100s of millions of users. Almost all of what we learn there helps make the product more reliable for customers and partners hosting their own servers from a small company to a 250,000 employee enterprise.
· UK-based Microsoft Online Services partner The BPOS Business has posted a video with instructions for synchronizing your Apple iPhone with an Exchange Online email account.
· Microsoft and Germany-based T-Systems announced an agreement for T-Systems to sell the Business Productivity Online Suite Dedicated solution in Germany.
· A French-language blog dedicated to the Business Productivity Online Suite is now online and included in our blogroll. The blog is edited and managed by our friends on the Microsoft Online Services team in the Microsoft France subsidiary. Bonjour!
