Microsoft CEO’s Vision for Cloud: Productivity, Platforms
Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella laid out his company’s roadmap and vision for cloud computing during a webcast on Monday — only a few short weeks before Amazon (AMZN) is expected to reveal its own plans during its AWS re:Invent conference.
The Redmond, Washington software giant used the webcast to announce a few new initiatives including the company’s G-series family of virtual machines optimized for data workloads, a new Azure Premium Storage offering, and the launch of an Azure Store. Here are the details.
Microsoft’s vision for cloud is based on both productivity and platforms, according to its CEO. Nadella said Microsoft looks at productivity “very broadly” by focusing on business processes and collaboration. When it comes to platforms, the company looks at how it can bring together end users, IT and developers.
“Simply put, we want to empower every individual and every organization to be able to thrive in this mobile-first, cloud-first world,” he said.
Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise group, introduced the addition of the company’s G-series family, virtual machines optimized for data workloads. He also announced Microsoft’s new Azure Premium Storage offering, which supports up to 32 terabytes of storage per virtual machine.
“The combination of these virtual machine sizes, together with the premium storage offering, delivers really an unparallel degree of performance in the cloud,” he said. “Customers before have never been able to stand up this type of power literally in seconds, with just a button click.”
Together with Dell, the Redmond, Washington-based company will be rolling out its Cloud Platform System (CPS) that provides customers with pre-integrated hardware from Dell and software from Microsoft, essentially like a cloud-in-a-box offering. CPS will be available for purchase on November 3.
Lastly, Microsoft unveiled its Azure Marketplace, which enables customers to search for and deploy operating systems, services and applications. This is a rebranding of Microsoft’s Azure Store.
Microsoft Group PR Manager Andrea Carl said the tech giant continuously calculates the number of apps and partners in the Azure Marketplace ecosystem, but right now it has thousands of apps and hundreds of partners.
Notable partners include: Cloudera, available in the marketplace after it the analytics and data management platform provider becomes certified; and CoreOS, a container-based Linux operating system, available now.
Guthrie claims that Microsoft is the only player in the market to bring hyper-scale, enterprise-grade and hybrid together into a single cloud platform.
“And combined they provide a truly unique offering that enables a set of solutions that are differentiated for customers and provides enormous opportunities to help them, as well as all of the ISVs and startups that server them, to grow their business,” he said.
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