Voices for Innovation

Just curious what people think of the cloud computing service launch at the Professional Developer Conference. 

It seems this will enable more choice and opportunity for customers and partners. 

According to the Seattle Times "On Azure, software developers can write Web-based applications using their existing skills, while saving costs and risks involved with the necessary infrastructure.  Microsoft will essentially rent space in one of its data centers; the developer won't have to buy or manage that computing power itself."

 Wondering if anyone has thoughts or ideas about what they have heard about this? 

Hello,

I was at the PDC and could learn first-hand about Azure and several other Cloud-related technologies Microsoft is putting out. Azure looks very interesting as a platform over which to develop applications, because of three main factors. First, it is familiar to developers, who will program it using the .Net Framework, and will need little training to learn how to create (cloud) applications and solutions. On the second hand, the Microsoft platform has a reach that other players in the SaaS/Software+Services space don't have, being a technology platform company, and I'm certain it will have a progressively larger adoption as time goes by (growing the entire "cloud-apps" space in the process, just like what happened a few years back with the "mobile operator wars"). And third, it's actually a very vast offer: if Azure is like a "fabric" on which to develop applications and store data in a scalable and distributed way, Live Mesh will offer simple synchronization of Data and Applications between your PC's and mobile devices (!!), .Net Services includes a standards-based authentication mechanism, message routing and service invocation across firewalls (much like MSN Messenger), and hosted workflow. Plus, there's also Sql Services, a data storage service  based in Sql Server but inspired in the likes of BigTable and tunned to work in redundant and distributed way (and publicly used, where others are just used internally), and finally you have the Office Web Apps. These were only shown at one of the keynotes, but go head on against Google Docs, seem to have high fidelity when compared to what you can do and see in the Office client applications, and with the added advantage that you can have online collaboration scenarios between the web version and the client version of Office (for example, you can be simultaneously editing a document inside your company, and your colleague who is away is also editing that same document remotely from outside the firewall).

To sumarize: Microsoft is putting out a lot of very very interesting Cloud-related software, and I'm sure they still have a lot of work to do to make sure all the pieces stick together both internally and externally.

On my part, I'd been watching the beta releases of both Live Mesh and .Net Services, and the only reason we didn't invest heavily in using these already is the "beta release" factor. Once Microsoft puts out new releases of their things, making sure that either compatability is not broken or that the previous versions are still available (since we'll need time to upgrade our solutions), and as an integration company, we plan to invest in the development of applications for this medium and to include it in all the projects where its use makes sense (and we do have some). Trust is one of the major issues to overcome, on the customers part, but I don't doubt that - as time goes by - this will stop being an issue, at least to a large enough part of our market.

Hope this helped,
João Pedro Martins

Thank you for your post!  It sure does help me better understand what partners and developers think about the annoucement.

Have you used the beta of Live Mesh at all?  If so, what do you think about it? 

I am also curious what you are saying to customers to overcome the "trust" factor you pointed out in your post.