Just catching up on some news from yesterday that the City and County of San Francisco are upgrading and consolidating their multiple citywide email systems used by more than 23,000 employees onto Microsoft Exchange Online, which is a cloud-based enterprise messaging solution.

The move is part of their efforts to improve the quality and efficiency of their services and reduce IT management costs.

Jon Walton, the San Francisco Chief Information Officer, also points out some of the other benefits such as ensuring that they have a system in place that is resilient.  In the news release he says:

“By moving to the Microsoft platform, we not only get immediate improvements to our system, but we gain a disaster-resilient system that provides the most modern information tools, with solid support provisions that can scale with the needs of our constituents.”

You can see the full details in the story at this link and there’s also a blog post from Microsoft’s Tom Rizzo which talks about it and some of the other government agencies that have recently adopted Microsoft’s cloud offerings.

For more information on what Microsoft has to offer businesses interested in cloud solutions, check out the Cloud Power site.  If you have questions or comments, post them here and I’ll get back to as quickly as possible.

Thanks for your time - Larry

I wanted to share news of an announcement this morning at SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP’s business and technology conference being held in Orlando, Florida this week.  The announcement states that SAP and Microsoft will work together on making application development and cloud management easier for developers and IT staff, helping customers harness the power of cloud computing.  Additionally Microsoft was named the SAP Global Technology Partner of the Year.

The details of the announcement are covered in the news release on the SAP site, as well as in a blog post from Microsoft’s Ted Kummert, SVP, Business Platform Division, which I’ve also included the text of below. Thanks for your time - Larry

SAP and Microsoft Make App Development and Cloud Management Easier

Microsoft’s broad partner ecosystem is what powers increased value and solutions for customers and their evolving business needs.

One example of this is today’s announcement of SAP and Microsoft’s plans to focus on two key areas: first, to help .NET Framework developers more easily build applications connecting to SAP, and second, to help customers harness the power of the cloud.  

As a result of this announcement, developers can expect much more support and integration between the development worlds of SAP and Microsoft. Business processes from SAP software can now be easily consumed and extended by .NET developers, simplifying the overall application development process. This level of access will immediately reduce the number of steps developers must take in order to ensure application integration, and also lead to shorter development cycles and lower costs.

Microsoft and SAP also plan to provide integration between SAP’s landscape management software, Microsoft System Center and Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V technology, bringing greater agility to cloud management and deployments.

This integration will instill enhanced flexibility, scalability and management in the cloud, all while reducing cost and risk. Through these connected offerings, SAP and Microsoft customers will be able to easily scale their deployments in their own data centers or through private clouds, for example, if they have a workload that needs on-demand scale periodically, such as a paycheck or employee performance review application.  

Together, Microsoft and SAP are committed to driving greater levels of innovation and flexibility for application development and cloud deployment – from your datacenter to the public cloud, eventually enabling hybrid computing scenarios via Windows Azure for companies to embrace cloud computing on their terms.

This announcement was made at SAPPHIRE® NOW, being held in Orlando, Florida, May 15-18, 2011 where Microsoft was also named SAP Global Technology Partner of the Year.

Posted by Ted Kummert

Senior Vice President, Business Platform Division, Microsoft

A colleague of mine, Mark Miller, was at a recent cloud computing dinner event in Silicon Valley.  He wrote up a brief summary of the event, which I thought would interest you and wanted to share.  Give it a read below and let me know if you have any comments or questions.  Thanks - Larry

New Research from Harvard Business Review Sparks Discussion at Cloud Computing Customer Event

Whether you’re an IT or business decision maker, it probably seems like all you hear these days is “cloud computing.” In fact, if you’re in any type of business, anywhere in the world, you are hearing a lot about cloud computing: the benefits it provides, the latest technologies available, and the various approaches to cloud adoption. For example at this year’s TechEd North America, the theme was Cloud Computing: Delivered and cloud computing was also the focus of a more intimate dinner last week in Silicon Valley.

This dinner brought together over 40 business and IT leaders from a variety of industries to hear Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT and leading voice on innovation, and Harvard Business Review’s research editor, Angela Herrin, discuss a Microsoft-sponsored whitepaper from Harvard Business Review, entitled, “How the Cloud Looks from the Top: Achieving Competitive Advantage In the Age of Cloud Computing.”

I encourage you to look at the whitepaper as it puts a distinctly business-oriented point of view on the transformative technology of cloud computing. The findings reaffirmed some of our perceptions about where the market is today – and I wanted to share a few key takeaways:

- Early adopters of cloud computing believe it has already provided significant new business value and over half of the respondents think cloud will be a source of competitive advantage.

- The majority of businesses believe cloud will be a significant part of their business over the next three years.

- Despite the promise of competitive advantage and the acceptance that cloud computing will be a reality, barriers to adoption still remain. These barriers include concerns around data security, compliance, and business continuity.

During the course of dinner, we discussed the survey results and also had the opportunity to go a level deeper - learning more about the cloud from the thought leaders at the event and each other. Here are a couple of highlights from the evening’s discussion:

- Many customers discussed the importance of interoperability for cloud computing, a point which was strongly reinforced by the event’s featured speaker, Michael Schrage. In particular, a customer from the healthcare industry expressed frustration about interoperability with current cloud offerings for that market, calling for better solutions.

- Michael also described how the cloud creates unique opportunities for businesses today by effectively bringing the cost of ‘process innovation’ down to zero. He believes people should think about business process as they move to the cloud and this focus on process is what will drive innovation - a shift to doing things in new ways.

It was a great evening – full of learning, insights and dialogue – and we look forward to continuing that experience at the next two events in June.  I believe that when we listen to our customers we can design and develop better products and strategies.  Forums like these help to inform our cloud vision, and help us offer the right array of solutions and technologies so you can move to the cloud on your terms.

I am excited to hear what business and IT leaders have to say at these future events and I’ll be sure to share these future insights with you on this blog. Until then, you can learn more about Microsoft’s approach to business-focused cloud computing at the Cloud Power site.

Thanks for your time – Mark Miller, Director, Server and Tools, Microsoft 

This week the Microsoft TechEd North America conference is taking place in Atlanta Georgia. TechEd is an annual conference which provides IT professionals and developers with deep technical education across Microsoft’s current and upcoming products, solutions and services.

Taking into account the high level of interest in private and public cloud computing this year, the conference includes extensive information on how attendees can begin to take advantage of the cloud, partners supporting it, and customers who are already actively adopting the technology.  Customers are turning to cloud computing for a variety of reasons such as the appealing economies of scale and the opportunities to improve the speed of innovation and application deployment.

One of the customers highlighted by Robert Wahbe, Corporate Vice President with Microsoft, during his keynote at TechEd and in his blog is Travelocity, a global online travel agency.  Travelocity chose Microsoft’s public cloud solution, Windows Azure, to deploy their Java-based critical analytics system to the cloud in just two months.  In the related news release, Dave Matthews, CTO at Travelocity, had the following to say:

“At Travelocity we work hard to understand our customers and make travel a quick and easy experience for them. We wanted the same for our transition to cloud computing, and the ability to quickly get new products to market, regardless of the platform, is an important advantage of Windows Azure, allowing us to easily move and deploy a core application to our business.”

You can hear more about why Travelocity chose Windows Azure and their experience building and deploying their application to the public cloud in the following video:

There's also an extended length version of this video with more details available here.

In his blog post, Robert also covers a topic I’ve previously blogged about, which is the economics of cloud computing. He talks about the TCO benefits when deploying to a public cloud, such as Windows Azure, which are driven by the combined effect of scale, demand diversification and multi-tenancy.  I urge you to check out the whitepaper if you haven’t previously to explore the potential benefits of cloud computing has for you and your business and the methodology behind the study.

To read more on the other announcements related to TechEd, such as partners supporting Microsoft’s cloud offerings, check out the news release and Robert’s blog post.  If you have other questions or would like to find more information on what Microsoft has to offer businesses interested in cloud computing check out the Cloud Power site.

Thanks for your time and if you have questions or comments, please post them here and I’ll work to get back to you as soon as possible.

Thanks – Larry

Couple of interesting updates on the Windows Azure front that I came across yesterday on Redmondmag.com and Mary Jo Foley’s All About Microsoft sites. 

Redmondmag.com covers the announcement from CA Technologies that they’re bringing their ARCserve backup and recovery solutions exclusively to the Windows Azure cloud computing platform as a SaaS solution in the second half of this year.  Sounds like there will be some nice integration as well with the story saying that setting up an ARCserve account will automatically establish a Windows Azure subscription. The solution will provide customers with the ability to specify critical files that they would like to store in Windows Azure in case of a complete disaster recovery scenario, such as some of the recent natural disasters in the news. 

In the article, Steve Fairbanks, CA’s VP of product management for data management is quoted giving a nice nod to the Windows Azure operations team saying: 

"We think that their SLAs, their security, everything about the Azure service really services our market well, so we're excited to partner with those guys. What's unique here is you're getting the combined local backup capabilities and the cloud storage capabilities all sold as a convenient service." 

The solution will provide a compelling set of offerings for customers looking for off-site storage of their mission critical information and data. 

The other story of interest is on Mary Jo Foley’s site covering the release of the Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS and the upcoming version for Android. There’s also a post on the Windows Azure blog that goes into more details on the announcement.  The toolkit adds to the already available version for Windows Phone 7 and provides resources and services designed to make it easier for iOS developers to use Windows Azure. 

Both stories demonstrate the increasing usage and options available to customers interested in taking advantage of the Windows Azure cloud computing platform either directly or via services offered by third parties. 

For more information on the cloud business offerings available from Microsoft, check out the Cloud Power site.  If you have questions or comments, please leave them here and I’ll work to address them as quickly as possible. 

Thanks for your time - Larry