The Sikh Geek

So what I started to hear at Remix UK and at the recent Steve Ballmer S+S London event was officially announced by Ray Ozzie at PDC 2008 in LA, Microsoft’s new Cloud OS called ‘Azure’.

You can checkout the keynotes here.

Tim Long has a good post on this and also Steve Clayton.

The Azure Site and the PDC Site.

Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC News Technology Correspondent reports from PDC.

So, if you thought things weren’t changing here is the proof of Microsoft’s new strategy.

Look out for more new announcements at PDC!

Thanks to Emily Lambert I was at the Microsoft Event entitled Software + Services: Are you ready to evolve? Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, was in town so it promised to be an important chance to hear Microsoft’s vision around S+S straight from the top.

Steve Clayton, who now heads up Microsoft’s S+S Strategy at Microsoft International, gave a clear and concise overview of S+S. Steve described the huge investment that Microsoft is making in its new Datacentres around the world and that 10,000 servers per month were being acquired and contrasted this with Facebook’s infrastructure which ran on a total 10,000 servers serving 25 million users. Steve highlighted that Microsoft had been in the Services business for a long time with things like Hotmail, Messenger and XBox Live.

For me the most valuable contribution was by David Mitchell (funnily, we follow each other on twitter!) Senior VP of IT Research at Ovum. David gave a great perspective as to how to position yourself in the emerging S+S era. It was perhaps not a surprise he said that the keys to growth and success were :

• Industry Specialisation (an area he said Microsoft needed to help Partners more on)
• Using finance to increase the average deal size and get paid quicker
• Having a mix of services in your business i.e. not putting all your eggs in one basket
• Making the investment now into Online services to be ready for the future (otherwise it will be too late)
• Having a repeatable solution which could be delivered with scale and low cost
• Outsourcing those parts of your business to those who could deliver it more cheaply
• Building Intellectual Property into your business

David said that despite the recent uncertainty in the global financial markets he still expected growth in the market albeit a slowing of growth but this might have to be revised as events unfolded. Even in sectors badly hit by the financial crisis such as the Construction Industry, large scale capital building projects were still going ahead and spending on IT to support this. Basically, he was saying look for the opportunities and the areas to focus on. What you were focusing on before might not be the right thing now.

He was asked if Microsoft had got it right with it’s S+S Strategy and he said that he believed they had the right building blocks but its success could not be measured yet as the services were not fully released and generating revenue, which would be ultimate test. He felt that nobody had got it right yet and couldn’t give more than about 2/3 out of 10 to anyone!

The highlight of the event was Steve Ballmer and boy does he have energy and passion! You couldn’t sleep through one of his presentations, not that you’d want to. Steve Ballmer announced that a new OS would be revealed at PDC and for now he would call it "Windows Cloud" (you can read The Register account of this as the reporter was at the event as well). It’s going to be intriguing what this is and it looks like PDC is going to be where a lot of new announcements are going to be made, so if you’re interested in Microsoft’s S+S Strategy then keep your eye on PDC. Steve Ballmer was keen to say that he understood that some Partners were not happy with Microsoft moving into this area but he said the business had to evolve to survive but that the Partner Ecosystem was still key to this.

I’ve changed my view of Steve Ballmer a lot over the years as I’ve seen him present live to Partners. I thought he provided a vision that I could plausibly buy into today. In a world where businesses are being badly let down by their leaders, then Steve Ballmer is actually a fresh of breath air. He said that he only gets 75 emails a day and if people wanted to email him then they should and he would get back to them, maybe not within 24 hours though!

So, if you’re interested in Microsoft’s Online Services you can sign-up for BPOS (Business Productivity Office Suite) at the Partner Portal but the services won’t come online in the UK until Spring 2009.

When I saw Dave recently at WPC he said he was writing this blog post and what an excellent one it is. It’s one of those ones where you should print it out and stick it your office wall or something or your bedroom wall if your partner/wife lets you

It’s clear in my mind that SaaS and/or S+S is happening and we can’t be like king Canute and try stop the tide coming in by standing on the beach and waving our hands to stop the tide coming in.

The problem for Microsoft is that they have very few people who can articulate to Partners their S+S strategy and to be honest I don’t see this changing anytime soon. Maybe I’ll be proved wrong, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Okay, I’m off to start a campaign to bring Dave back to the happy family that is SBSC

Listen to "Mr Virtualisation" and his thoughts on Online Services.