"We're Doomed!...

SmallCountry — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 11:10:18 GMT

...as Private Frazer was prone to shout whenever Captain Mainwaring's home guard faced a crisis.

Likewise I have long bored colleagues with prophecies of doom for those failing to embrace new business models enabled by "cloud computing".

"Doom" might be overstating it, as the Microsoft's partners making a living from installation and service of customers' PC server, collaboration and application infrastructure continue to do rather well - so much was obvious in the Aberdeen Microsoft Partner group last night who heard about Microsoft Virtualisation and Management strategy from Matt McSpirit. Business is good in Aberdeen right now, as the Oil/Gas industry continues to stoke customers IT budgets in the Northern boom town, whilst Financial Services dependant partners in the central belt are increasingly dismayed by the glbal financial outlook.

However, the arrival of Internet Services such as BPOS potentially make a customer less reliant on a friendly IT partner based round the corner. Consider a partner providing Exchange email for a customer- cross-border cattle-rustlers could offer this service through BPOS undercutting or undermining the partners installation and maintenance revenue.

BPOS won't suit all customers, but the smart partners are learning how they can blend it into their existing services - so that they can continue to offer a "value-added" relationship to their customer base, which includes Software Services offerings like BPOS as and where appropriate.

The BPOS juggernaut is on its way and will reach our shores in Spring 2009. I encourage partners to look at the trial and sign up.

In the meantime, Steve Ballmer was moved to describe online services as "a platform for the next technology revolution" in his Exec Email yesterday following Bob Muglia and Ray Ozzie's announcements of Microsoft Azure Services, formerly known as RedDog, at the Professional Developers Conference yesterday. In his words

"Azure will enable developers to build applications that extend from the cloud to the enterprise datacenter and span the PC, the Web, and the mobile phone".

The new cloud services operating system runs in Microsoft Datacenters and is a platform for applications - as opposed to a "finished" application like Exchange Online or Live Meeting.

This gives enterprises and developers a new option to host apps and services in the cloud - providing on demand computing and storage to enable applications without up-front investment in infrastructure.

A pay as you go hosted platform for any app, taking full advantage of developer's skills in .NET, and the like, will likely be an attractive means for an organisation to move processing off-premise or for an ISV to build and distribute its app without the hassle of deploying servers. By taking advantage of other web services such as SQL, Sharepoint online and CRM Live, and leveraging consumers's data synchronised across his Mesh of devices, powerful applications can be composed with low initial costs. Whats's more they could scale up readily to meet demand, and potentially allow organisations to reduce capital investment and move costs to ongoing operational expenditure.

At the core of Azure is .NET Services (the artist formerly known as Biztalk, providing the backbone to compose, sequence and orchestrate processes up in the cloud) and SQL Data Services (a hierarchical data store in the cloud built on SQL Server). As ever, David Chappell has reduced a tricky concept to the level of a Ladybird Book in his newly published white paper.

As if that was not enough, the PDC this year also annouced Office Web Applications, lightweight browser delivered versions of the Office apps which will be added to Office Live when Office 14 is released.

Don't Panic Mr Mainwaring!

Peter's Technology Trumpet : Unified Communications

"We're Doomed!...