Today at our annual Financial Analyst's Meeting (FAM) we announced that The Dow Chemical Co., Hyatt Hotels Corporation and the University of Georgia have each selected Microsoft cloud solutions. If you'd like to watch any of Executive keynotes, please visit the digital site dedicated to this event.

Three Different Customers, One Common Strategy

These three customers are certainly a diverse set of businesses but they do share a common strategic direction to leverage Microsoft's cloud for the next generation of their computing needs. Ina Fried from CNET has a great summary of the customer stories in her post from today's announcement.

Momentum

These customers join over 40 million paid users' who leverage Microsoft Online services today including 500 government entities, 13 of top 20 global telecom firms, 15 of the Top 20 global banks, and 16 of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies. As I previously posted, Windows Azure also has recently announced the addition of over 10,000 customers in nine months since full scale production.

Hyatt Hotels & Resorts – Check's In to BPOS

This win is another great example of a customer leaving an on premises competitive solution for Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite. Just like Codelco, Hyatt will take advantage of the full suite for "information workers" while offering a more cost effective option for 40,000 associates who do not have a need for fully dedicated suite. This is a great way to unify the entire workforce with one platform and enable a common user experience for everyone.

University of Georgia – UGA is All In

For those not familiar, the University's mascot is 'the bulldogs'. In fact, there is a real bulldog affectionately named "UGA" pictured below. His Bio is here. With teeth like that, you better believe we are excited to have him on our side!

  (courtesy: georgiabulldogs.com)

Over 85,000 students, faculty and staff will take advantage of Live@Edu. The university joins other great educational institutions such as the University of Arizona, Kentucky Department of Education and New York City public school district who have recently selected Microsoft as their vendor for cloud based solutions.

Dow Chemicals – The Right Formula is Microsoft Online

Dow Chemical is moving their enterprise workforce to BPOS. Global companies such as Dow have expansive business units and a need to remain reliable and highly secure while taking advantage of the flexibility the cloud can enable. We are very excited about welcoming them to the BPOS family.

For more information on any of Microsoft's cloud solutions, please this website.

We just wrapped up our annual Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), held in Washington, D.C. where thousands of partners from over 100 countries came to participate in this years meme 'Cloud Computing'.  If you haven't seen any of the coverage or watched the keynotes, I highly recommend you take some time to visit the digital site to take in some of the content. 

Other Experts with a capital 'E'!

My two favorite blogs this week were actually here on the "Meet the Experts" blog.  Mario Jaurez on the Windows Server blog does a great job explaining the news surrounding our new Windows Azure Platform Appliance which in IMHO is a game changer and huge differentiators for us in this space.   Donald Farmer weighs in on the SQL Server blog with a great write upon "Project Dallas" our information marketplace that will revolutionize the sharing and usage of large data sets.  Read both as they will give you an appreciation of just how massive our "All In" initiative is across Microsoft.

Industry Meme

Over the last couple of weeks, it's clear the cloud discussion is growing louder and more dispersed. It's sort of like a conversation that starts between two people, a third joins, a fourth and fifth weigh in, then split off to talk about something new and so on and so on.  This is a sign of momentum and maturity.  We are now well beyond the Hype Cycle and into real execution by vendors and significant usage by customers. 

Mr. Cloud goes to Washington

The week before WPC, several companies went to our nations capital to attend a hearing on cloud computing held by the Oversight Committee to Examine Government-wide Transition to Cloud Computing. Information Week covered the newsand our own Scott Charney discussed Microsoft's view on the cloud and it's potential opportunities and challenges.  When it comes to 'walking the walk' in public sector, I think our success with the Kentucky Department of Education demonstrates just how powerful, fast and wide sweeping a cloud project can be for constituents.

Federal News Radio also featured a great interviewwith Vince Menzione, General Manager of Microsoft where he discussed how Microsoft's solutions are built to meet the needs of customers with flexibility and security at the core.

Cloud as an Inbox

Dan Lyons over at Newsweek also posted a great storyabout my area of expertise, cloud based productivity and messaging. He highlights two great Microsoft customer stories, Rexel and Serena Software,  who both recently migrated to our BPOSsolution.  The cloud can deliver dramatic cost savings, on average of 30% for workloads like email and collaboration. But 'cheap' isn't the only driver because as with everything, you get what you pay for. Just ask these customers how they felt about pursing a 'cheap only' cloud strategy.

Despite outrages claims by some vendors, the cloud isn't magic.  It's just another way for great software companies to deliver the next wave of innovation for another generation of computing.

Don't Eat Dogfood, Unless it's Your Own

"Dogfooding" is a term that was started by engineers at Microsoft.  I originally read about the term in the book "Showstopper" and immediately became fascinated with software and in particular Microsoft's approach to build world class products.  Put simply, it means to use your own stuff as early and as often as possible. I am huge believer in this but might feel differently if I were a virologist tinkering with new vaccines.  :) 

Techtarget had a nice write up about Amazon making the move internally over to their AWS (Amazon Web Services) solution.  At Microsoft, we still 'dogfood' most every product we deliver, including our new cloud offerings.  For example, I've been using our Office Web Apps for over a year and my inbox is managed by the same team of Ops engineers who support our BPOS customers.   This approach makes our products stronger, makes our customer happier and in the end, drives the industry forward. 

Catching up on a set of industry news there were two articles recently that caught my eye as significant and worth summarizing. 

The Next Four Years According to IDC

The first was Frank Gens blog over at IDC where he summarized their new forecast for public IT Cloud services spending for the next four years.  As with any macro spending forecast, it's half science, half art but the fact that IDC remains one of the most respected data analysis firms, it's worth sitting up when they predict spending will increase from approx $16.5Billion spent in 2009 to over $55 Billion in 2014, creating a 'scorching fast growth of 27% per year'.   

This sort of forecasted growth is exactly why we are now sharing externally that approximately 90% of engineering at Microsoft will be working on cloud related projects in the coming years.  When we say we are 'All In', we mean it.   The cloud enables phenomenal new scenarios and business models that is solved by great software which just happens to run somewhere else.  So in the future will you rely on software built by software companies like Microsoft Or will you bet on new entrants who make 97% of their revenue from Advertising and Search?  (Yes, Google).  Microsoft is a leader in the majority of Gartner Magic Quadrants today and my prediction is that when SaaS/IaaS/PaaS quadrants become the norm, we'll lead there too. 

My Prediction:  Knowing software and understanding enterprise needs will translate very well to the cloud for Microsoft.  For Windows Azure, the evidence is already mounting after we acknowledged 10,000 customers only months after going into full production.

John Soat's Five Predictions - I agree, mostly....

The next article worth summarizing is John Soat's "Five Predictions Concerning Cloud Computing" post over on Information Week.  Please do read it but for my use, I've summarized his five below.  Since John doesn't provide time period it's hard to argue with 'ever' so I've self imposed a 'in the next four years' (using similar IDC time) to evaluate his predictions.

1. All Applications will move the Cloud. 
2. Platform-as-a-Service will supplant SaaS.
3. Private Clouds will dominate Public
4. Hybrid will dominate

5. Cloud Computing will disappear as a term.

All Apps Move to the Cloud - sort of..but not without tradeoffs

The first one is arguably the most contentious.  Running an application that physically sits somewhere else is as old as Remote Desktop & Terminal Services introduced in the NT era.  This gave rise to companies like Citrix who enabled customers to install software on servers where someone could hit the box and screen scrape the session somewhere else.  But John is likely arguing for a more SaaS purist approach where browsers, with no add-ins/plug-ins, can run an application such as a Word processor served from a high scale, multitenant platform.  His example of CAD software is an interesting selection as it's usually the example touted as 'impossible' due to the reliance on local GPU for rendering etc that only a bare-metal (on a PC) install can provide. 

HTML5 is not a panacea but in the next four years it will enable browsers to leverage local hardware to enable better graphics.  IE9's preview has already weighed in with examples on how this will be possible.  But what still isn't fully solved in the next four years will be the issue of latency.  All applications require code and complex apps will still require complex code.  That code needs a 'run time' to execute tasks.  So when you take applications that run really fast on a PC and push them to a server, you introduce time and space for the processing which means latency. 

Consider an application like an Excel Spreadsheet installed on a PC which has latency of microseconds that are not even perceptible by a human. It's literally using speed of light on the chip to process, use RAM and leverage GPU.  If you scroll down through thousands of rows of data, it's as fast as the hardware can perform.    But take the same spreadsheet and run it in a browser and then scroll through hundreds of rows.  Chances are you will you now notice the performance lag as the app waits, pauses, then gives you more rows. Why?  Simple.  The 'run time' is on the server, so when a user scrolls, the browser makes a 'call' across the wire back to the server to simply 'fetch and paint' the next set of rows you want to see.  In today's SaaS world this is something the user can actually witness, so this is a trade-off.   Also consider the current constraints of 'offline' or in cloud terms when you lose an Internet connection.   Google recently nixed their 'offline'docs and spreadsheets scenario likely because it was basically a view only scenario.  Why?  Simple.  Browsers don't natively ship with a calculation engine.  That engine sits on the server, so lose your connection, you lose the important part of a spreadsheet! Oh, but I could have typed 'offline' you will retort.  True, you were able to leverage the browser control that allows text input but you couldn't insert Pictures or use a font not supported by a browser, so it was pretty stripped down feature set.

WinMobile, iPhone, Android have all proved that rich apps still matter.  Most apps install on the phone itself.  So even in the mobile space, the ultimate disconnected, untethered experience relies on installation of application to leverage resources from the device.

My prediction:  HTML5 will become the foundation for the next web and drive new apps.  But it won't create seamless magic for any application to run in the browser without any tradeoffs.  Most applications that a business user runs on a daily basis will simply run better when installed on a PC and while cloud will offer new cool scenarios, we won't see every app in the cloud with full parity in the next four years. Ever? Sure.

Platform as a Service replaces Software as a Service as 'most important' - Correct

I definitely agree here as it makes total sense when you think about it.  Every application needs a platform to run on top off.   As a SaaS player, it's tough to go it alone because of the huge CAPEX requirements to build data centers and a open platform.  I feel super bullish about Microsoft in this space because our heritage is in the platform.  Azure or WindowsInTune reflect our maturity in understand the provisioning, management and application development required to build a platform in the cloud.  Since Azure supports multiple languages, we are opening up to embrace the broadest set of developers for the enterprise.

My prediction:  Windows Azure will become the must use platform as a service for developers of all types. 

Private Clouds will dominate Public in larger Organizations - Complexity and the Security are the Reason

Companies that are larger are typically more complex.  Geographic exposure, size of partners and suppliers, numbers of employees etc all feed complexity in IT.  As a result, the demands of larger customers to have a private cloud make sense.  This is one of the reasons why we launched BPOS-Federal earlier this year.  In the public sector there are particular security controls and certifications to run software and host data.  As a result, it makes more sense to create a unique, private or ring fenced cloud that can meet requirements such as ITAR, FIPS 140-2 etc.  I used to work at SAP Markets 10 years ago when B2B markets became a way to create private trading networks which was arguably v1 of private clouds based on commerce between entities.  Now the cloud enables shared data, shared resources so a private cloud will become a smarter way for larger organizations to leverage the efficiency of cloud but in a more tailored, reliable and secure approach.

My prediction:  Debate will continue in the industry to define clear lines between a private and public cloud for 2 more years.  But the industry will cease to care after 2 years and it will be totally acceptable to pick whatever cloud based approach you want.

Hybrid Clouds eventually dominate - Without it, this is all just an ultimatum

The concept of deploying code anywhere you want is a huge software challenge as tasks must orchestrate across multiple run times and platforms.  Without this ability, the cloud could be seen as an 'Ultimatum' on IT.  For every customer who wants to go 'All In' today, it's great and for every other one that wants to wait, that's okay too!  Hybrid scenarios allow for this reality to occur and it's why BPOS is architected to talk to on premises versions of the software and why Windows Azure App Fabric and Windows Server AppFabric are key assets for Microsoft to enable Hybrid scenarios for the future.

My prediction:  Where software lives, cloud or not, will cease to be the primary windmill we all charge for debate.  It will be replaced with how deeper debate about how software orchestrates and spans any implementation in the most seamless way. 

Cloud will Drop as a Term - Hopefully.

This is my favorite.  As cloud platforms grow and become mainstream, hybrid scenarios will also demonstrate a more fluid software experience.  This is will make the definition no longer be relevant and it won't matter.  We'll all go back to realizing it's all software and every company will leverage the best tools and methods to meet their strategy.  'Cloud' will sound as funny as 'information superhighway' or 'Handheld Device'.  In the end, the companies who build great software will continue to be the preferred vendors and this is why Microsoft is so well positioned for years to come.

My prediction:  In the future, I will still read about the Top 5 things to come in the future and enjoy seeing what actually came true.