Windows Azure Signals Start of Misty Computing — Microsoft Will Always Sell to the Enterprise

Here is how I see it, Microsoft would want to hold onto their dom­in­ance in the enter­prise, from where some­thing like 80% of their rev­enue comes. To fol­low the mar­ket, they need to develop a viable Cloud Computing system((It doesn’t really mat­ter whether it is the future or not, they HAVE to put some­thing into this space)). The biggest chal­lenge is to develop a sys­tem that Corporate cus­tom­ers will buy.

Lets assume that this is true. Corporate cus­tom­ers are very unlikely to buy Azure any­time soon. It needs to be proven with large work­loads, applic­a­tions need to be spe­cific­ally developed for it, and data cen­ters need to be built that host the exact serv­ers, stor­age and net­works that this will require.
Normally, a rad­ical product like this would mean that a sales force would be setup to tar­get early adop­ters and ver­tical applic­a­tions and depar­ately try to get them to buy it. In return, cus­tom­ers will get a LOT of help, access to internal tech sup­port, free mar­ket­ing and, pos­sibly, brag­ging rights as a mar­ket leader. The Azure concept is too big to find an early adop­ter that would be credible.

The other cri­teria is that the “mar­ket” expects to Microsoft to make a “Cloud Computing” play. Here it is, but with options to sell dir­ect to Enterprise in the future, a two way bet.

So how do you handle these cus­tomer objec­tions ? Today, you go the Web 2.0 way: put it on the Internet, give it away for free for the first couple of years while you iron out the bugs and scal­ing prob­lems. You refine the fea­ture sets accord­ing to cus­tomer feed­back, and develop your oper­a­tional tools for mianten­ance of the sys­tem. You might make a bit of cash back in advert­ising rev­enue or by char­ging a small fee for premium ser­vices, but the real win­ner is when you are ready to sell it to Enterprises.

During this time, developers have been using the Internet Cloud to develop applic­a­tions and test them, some cor­por­ates might even have star­ted using these new applic­a­tions on the cloud. Enough, at least, to prove that they work and provide mar­ket­ing col­lat­eral for white papers.

At this point, Enterprise IT staff will be ready to con­sider Azure for Misty Computing.

Misty Computing is where you can see through the cloud to the ele­ments that make it up such as serv­ers, soft­ware, net­work­ing: a determ­in­istic plat­form. They are all joined together by a soft­ware sys­tem that auto­mates pro­vi­sion­ing and oper­a­tion but the IT Manager will be able to see what the sys­tem con­tains and make determ­in­istic decisions about its future.

Cloud Computing is intan­gible and unima­gin­ably impossible for more Corporates, Misty Computing offers local, quasi-​​visible, con­trolled resources that have the advant­ages of the cloud.

Cloudy Computing will need a lot of iron in the early days, but I feel con­fid­ent that this will shrink rap­idly — so much so that Misty Computing will be the pre­ferred alternative.

Is Cloud Computing just an beta ver­sion of the next gen­er­a­tion data centers ?

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