Specifically, Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer, outlined a four-point plan to the 200-odd financial analysts for increasing profits:

1. Cloud computing – Emphatically and repetitively, we have heard Microsoft say they are “all in” on cloud computing. Turner believes that Microsoft not only can be, but is “by far the market leader” of the cloud. Microsoft has been quietly developing cloud support for its business solutions, and only now in 2010 has been busting them out.

2. Windows 7 and Office 2010 – in the meantime, Microsoft’s standard software product line will be chugging along. The steadfast popularity of both of these products will drive predictably massive sales.

3. Customer satisfaction. Simple enough of a business objective.

4. Grow market share. Similarly simple.

Microsoft gives every impression of utmost confidence in its IT goliath standings. They believe in their edge over every other cloud competitor out there: Salesforce and Google fall “far short of what [Microsoft is] doing from an Azure perspective” (Google also has laughable productivity applications in comparison to Office), Amazon provides only “a limited set of platform as a service capabilities,” and VMWare is losing to Microsoft’s “better and less expensive virtualization offering.” Turner also noted that the shares for Microsoft servers and databases are growing faster than those of Linux, IBM, and Oracle. Clearly, these are children among one large-headed man.

Microsoft still views itself as a spry, innovative corporation. In regards to cloud computing, the company is in it for long term development. Turner says, “This is going to be a multiyear journey. We’re not going to accomplish this in the next twelve months.”

New Microsoft products are also rolling out: the Windows Phone 7 OS and the Kinect video game motion sensor for the Xbox. Now my tongue may be stuck in cheek, but one will enter the market outclassed by Apple and Google, and the other is foiled by gamers who enjoy lying down.

But don’t mind me. You go win those investors, Microsoft.

A webcast of the whole affair is available at Microsoft’s website.

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A Break From the Routine

IT managers increasingly see their role as delivering business value rather than managing technology. According to the same research, their business priorities reflect this. The top five objectives are business process improvement, reducing enterprise costs and increasing the use of information/analytics, improving workforce effectiveness and attracting new customers. Everyone around the boardroom table shares these goals.

But when you look at where IT departments actually spend money, a different story emerges. Around 90 percent goes on routine maintenance and administration costs2. Only a small fraction is available for innovation. When money is tight, it sometimes seems easier to cut this part of the budget when, in reality, smart decision-making can turn early investments in change and improvement into big savings later by reducing the long-term burden of routine maintenance.  Read more >>

Complete the form below to access this White Paper from MessageLabs:

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More here: 
Microsoft Security Essentials vNext Now in Beta

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I find this development interesting, not only because it makes scientific applications in the cloud a possibility, but also because it’s an indication of where cloud infrastructure is heading.

In the early days, Amazon EC2 was very simple: if you wanted 5 “instances” (that is, 5 virtual machines), that’s what you got. However, memory of the instances was low, as well as disk capacity. Over time, more and more configurations were added and now one can choose an instance type from a variety of disk & memory characteristics with up to 15GB of memory and 2TBs of disks per instance. However, network was always a problem independently of the size of the instance. (According to rumors, EC2 would make things worse by distributing instances as far away from each other as possible in the datacenter to increase reliability – as a result, network latency would suffer.) Now, the network problem is being solved by means of these special “Cluster Compute Instances” that provide guaranteed, non-blocking access to a 10GbE network infrastructure.

Overall this course represents a departure from the super-simple black-box model that EC2 started from. Amazon – wisely – realizes that accommodating more applications requires transparency – and providing guarantees – for the underlying infrastructure. Guaranteeing network latency is just the beginning: Amazon has the opportunity add much more options and guarantees around I/O performance, quality of service, SSDs versus hard drives, fail-over behavior etc. The more options & guarantees Amazon offers the closer we’ll get to the promise of the cloud – at least for resource-intensive IT applications.

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Cloud computing is the main theme at this week’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, and Hyper-V has taken a backseat to Windows Azure. The focus on Azure, a Platform as a Service (PaaS), marks a significantly different approach to private clouds than VMware has taken with its cloud infrastructure model.

And it means that when we talk about the battle between VMware and Microsoft, the folks in Redmond want us to talk less about vSphere vs. Hyper-V and more about vSphere vs. Azure.

Go to any VMware show and you’ll hear that vSphere, its virtual infrastructure product, is the foundation for building a private cloud. But during his WPC keynote yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said, “The difference between a cloud infrastructure and a virtual infrastructure is dramatic.” (Of course, as our senior news director Barbara Darrow wrote, “That’s what I would say too if I were trying to displace the VMware juggernaut.”)

Furthering Ballmer’s message, Microsoft’s Robert Wahbe, corporate vice president of server and tools marketing, told me yesterday, “The heart of a cloud is Platform as a Service. … Infrastructure as a Service is a feature of a cloud platform, but it’s just a feature.”

Azure has strictly been a public cloud platform, focused on developers, but that changed yesterday when Microsoft announced the Windows Azure Platform Appliance. Hyper-V will be part of the platform, but it’s unclear exactly how much.*

Framed this way, Microsoft’s approach to virtualization and private clouds seems very comprehensive. But it’s a long ways off for most customers — even Wahbe acknowledged that the infrastructure piece, which is VMware’s focus, is “where people are today” — and Azure and Hyper-V are still relatively new products.

Will this approach help Microsoft catch up to VMware? Maybe, but not anytime soon.

*For some reason, Wahbe and other Microsoft execs were reluctant to say that Azure is “based on Hyper-V,” instead saying that its virtualization technology uses Hyper-V, System Center and Windows Server. I’m not sure what the difference is, but apparently there is one. And in case you were wondering, the appliance won’t support VMware, Wahbe said.

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Microsoft just announced an on-premises version of its Azure cloud computing platform that will be available to hosting providers and customers through an appliance (or better: a large number of racks of appliances).

Microsoft is still mum about the Azure capability to run as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud, and there’s no trace of this feature in the online version of the platform, at the point that there are doubts about the company’s plans to compete against Amazon EC2 as previously announced.

But a new confirmation arrives exactly from this new Azure appliance. The just published FAQ page about the product in fact, clearly mentions the IaaS capability:

How is Microsoft Windows Azure platform appliance different from running a datacenter with Windows Server, Hyper-V and System Center?

The Microsoft Windows Azure platform appliance allows customers and partners to deploy Windows Azure and SQL Azure in their own datacenters. The appliance is a turnkey cloud platform that runs on hundreds to thousands of servers optimized to deliver hosting services and massive scale-out applications, PaaS, SaaS, IaaS or high performance computing. Windows Server, Hyper-V and System Center is a versatile, customizable server platform that allows customers and partners to build and run a dynamic, virtualized infrastructure and private clouds.

So, with this move Microsoft is not only going after Amazon, but also after VMware and its upcoming vCloud Service Director (vCSD, formerly project Redwood), that will be supposedly unveiled in September at the VMworld 2010 conference.

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The 2010 edition of the VMware’s conference VMworld is approaching fast. The company already published the session catalog which, easy to guess, has a strong focus on private cloud computing and the upcoming vCloud Service Director (vCSD, formerly codename Project Redwood).

virtualization.info recommends a few sessions:

• DV7180 – ThinApp : What’s New and Future Vision
  This session will detail new features and enhancements to the ThinApp product since VMWorld 2009, including the 4.0.3, 4.0.4, and 4.5 releases as well upcomming releases that occur between now and VMWorld 2010. The second half of the session will present part of our vision for the future of application virtualization and demonstrate some demos of possible future technology.
• MA7140 – vCloud Architecture Design Strategies and Design Patterns
  This session focuses on the building blocks for a vCloud architecture. Using Design Patterns is fundamental for a successful design and deployment. We will provide a Conceptual Model including the requirements and constraints and conceptually represents what we are trying to produce. The Logical Design shows the relationship of the components.
  This session uses the experience of the VMware TS Cloud Team for deployments with Enterprise Private Cloud and with Cloud Providers.

• MA8027 – Provisioning Cloud Computing on Vblock using VMware vCloud Service Director
  This session focuses on provisioning vApps in cloud environment. Starting with at the hardware layer, provisioning of UCS servers in Vblock architecture, applying server profiles and related policies. Moving up the stack with installing and configuring vSphere, applying host profiles, creating and deploying network/storage policies. Carving out resource, network and storage pools for Cloud computing using VMware vCloud Service Director. Create Service catalogs, apply cost models using Chargeback, deploy vApps in multi-tenant environment.
• MA8030 – Saving Time with vCenter Orchestrator
  Starting with a demo of how to use the bulk operations workflow to maximize your investment in vCenter Orchestrator, we will walk through how to modify a few workflows that saves a few minutes of your day. We will also show some of the best practices of writing workflows.
• MA8092 – Cloud Futures: The Infrastructure Authority
  To realize the potential of private cloud, infrastructure must be capable of not just dynamically provisioning and optimizing systems, but also not violating any security, regulatory, or organizational policy constraints in the process. In many enterprise environments, dynamic IT consists of several disjointed solutions and oftentimes blind faith that policy, security, or regulatory constraints will not be broken. The bottom line – someone has to be in charge. The infrastructure authority (IA) is the future nerve center of cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) operations. Among the many roles the IA possesses are:
  • Provides a central metadata store
  • Leverages common data models to request or offer services
  • Maintains physical, virtual, and policy dependency maps
  • Ensures security and regulatory compliance
  • Ensures that service level requirements are met
  • Stores and enforces organizational policy
  • Ensures accurate capacity forecasts
  • Integrates with third party management and orchestration tools to authorize IT operations such as provisioning or relocation before they proceed
  Typical questions answered by the IA include:
  • Are security zoning rules checked before live migrating a VM?
  • Do any policy restrictions prevent VMs from migrating to different data centers or to public cloud infrastructure?
  This session takes a practical look at the emerging role of the IA, and details how existing management frameworks such as VMware vCenter and industry standards such as OVF can be used in this capacity moving forward.
• MA8181 – Optimizing Capacity using vCenter CapacityIQ
  This session will provide recommendations and best practices to optimizing your VMware virtual infrastructure capacity using vCenter CapacityIQ. The session will provide a deep dive into how CapacityIQ analyzes and forecasts capacity utilization, how it identifies unused capacity and how it predicts your future capacity needs. It will explain the key CapacityIQ concepts and methodology as well as help you understand and interpret all the data presented.
• MA8649 – VMware Server Configuration Manager: Our Foundation for Compliance in the Private Cloud
  Compliance to regulatory requirements and IT standards is an important issue that drives many IT initiatives including security and threatens to limit cloud adoption. Learn how Server Configuration Manager (SCM) enables customers to ensure compliance and provide visibility and control of their IT infrastructure. SCM helps automate mundane tasks, reduce manual errors and increase application availability. Learn how SCM can help your customers dramatically reduce their operating costs, and experience firsthand this new solution which provides a foundation for compliance in the cloud.
• (for partners only) PA9444 – VMware Service Provider Cloud Licensing Programs
  This course will give you an overview of VMware’s licensing and pricing strategies for VMware Service Provider Partners. It will also cover program elements including requirements and key benefits of the VMware Service Provider Program. As cloud computing continues to evolve, VMware is enhancing and clarifying our licensing and pricing models to ensure our Service Provider Partners have the best in class pricing and licensing models along with world class product and programs.
• PC8051 – Infrastructure Technologies to Long Distance VMotion – What Is “VM Teleportation”?
  Join this session and learn about infrastructure technologies purpose built for long distance VMotion and Cloud federation. Using existing technologies such as vSphere and active-active virtual storage models, you will discover new innovations to move active VM’s and workloads over distance without disruption. New techniques and best practices such as the conception of “VM teleportation” will be illustrated and discussed. Discussion of VM HA and DRS behavior and best practices with stretched vSphere clusters, including new changes in vSphere. Learn also about upcoming technologies that can help overcome limitations with current technologies including VMotion over geographies, and the support of cloud computing and federation.
• PC8422 – Introduction to vCloud API
  We envision the vCloud REST API to become a key technology for managing, provisioning and automation in the vCloud infrastructure. The API is a major part of the vCloud offering and there will be a significant interest from both Service providers, Enterprises and ISV to implement custom solutions on top of the API or to consume/manage cloud services from the vCloud ecosystem.
  In this presentation we will describe the design and the architecture of the vCloud API, will present the key concepts and idioms of the API, and will deep dive into the user (which is focused on provisioning) and the admin API (which is focused on automating and managing the cloud infrastructure). In addition few major usage scenarios of the vCloud API will be explored.
• SE7835 – Securing Your Cloud
  This session will provide an overview of the core security Features in VMware’s new VCloud Services Director Product. We will provide an overview of the architecture, key security features, how a Service Provider or Enterprise can offer a secure IaaS platform to their customers using VMware’s VCloud Services Director features and outline a roadmap for planned new security features in upcoming releases.
• SP9721 – How to Use Virtual I/O to Provision and Manage Networks and Storage Resources in a Private Cloud
  Join this session to learn best practices for using virtual I/O to provision network and storage resources within a private cloud.
  With live demonstrations and practical examples, we will show how virtual I/O lets you assign, provision, and manage network and storage resources based on application and user requirements.
  You will learn the key elements of virtual I/O and how this technology changes the connectivity landscape to deliver far more connectivity and more bandwidth to servers than is possible with traditional I/O. We will discuss practical tips on how to run more virtual machines per server while delivering a superior, more predictable user experience.
  Virtual I/O fundamentally re-defines and streamlines resource provisioning. Join Camden Ford — a seasoned storage and networking architect — to learn how to make the most of these capabilities. Create, manage, and even chargeback for new value added services, and get the most from your virtualization deployment.
• TA8218 – VMware Storage Vision
  A VMware engineering executive will describe VMware’s multi-year vision for storage. The discussion will cover strategic directions such as:
  • How VMware sees storage architectures changing to meet the needs of virtualized deployments for SMB, enterprise datacenter, VDI deployments, and service provider clouds
  • How VMware sees changes in application architectures impacting its products’ interaction with storage over time
  • VMware’s directions in its own storage product line as well as its strategy for partner engagement and growing the capabilities of the storage hardware and software ecosystem
• TA8361 – Future Direction of Networking Virtualization
  Virtual Switch becomes an integral part of today’s data center.
  What is the next big wave of new technology coming in the cloud era?
  The speaker will discuss how upcoming new virtual networking technology that can significantly improve data center efficiency, elasticity, QoS, and SLA.

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At a conference this week in Washington DC, Microsoft will be highlighting those partners that have managed to make the transition to be a more cloud-centric business. They will also  attempt to convince the others in attendance that it is time for them to be leading with cloud services like Microsoft’s own Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), the Azure Cloud Platform, and the Windows InTune systems management software/service.

Cloud – Computing

Microsoft, in a critical business move, is hoping to get partners on board with Microsoft’s cloud push since Microsoft relies heavily on resellers, integrators, and  independent software vendors and OEMs to act as the primary sales force. After all, if Microsoft’s partners didn’t buy into their whole host of products, Microsoft’s sales dimension would look very different.

So cloud – partnership arrangements may be discussed at the conference.  According to some of Microsoft’s partners, the model is changing a bit. Today, it’s about the field driving an EA (Enterprise Agreement). The partners will need to adjust that in order to accommodate cloud products.

Some expect Microsoft to discuss the release of its BPOS Suite, which is known as “BPOS Lite”. Some of the features include the application and the cost:

The full suite is $15 per/user per month; the breakdown for each product is:

* $10 per user/month for Exchange Online
* $7.25 user/month for SharePoint Online
* $2.50 user/month for Office Communications Online
* $4.50 user/month for Office Live Meeting
* $2 per user/month for Exchange Online Deskless Worker
* $2 per user/month for SharePoint Online Deskless Worker

Project Sydney is also expected to be discussed.  Project Sydney is a a secure networking offering designed to connect on-premises and cloud offerings from Microsoft.

Source:  ZDnet

Related posts:

1. Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite Roll Out Plans
2. Microsoft Online Services Sign In For Windows – Upgraded
3. R.I.P. Microsoft Office
4. Microsoft Releases Office 2010 and Its Impact on Business
5. Microsoft SQL Azure – A Database for the Cloud

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The evolution of this market is all but complete.
Virtual infrastructures can mature in so many different areas, from orchestration to security, that we really have just started. While the industry continues to make progress in these segments, and prepares to enter the next big phase with application virtualization, another completely new, billion dollar market is forming these days: cloud computing.
We want to track the birth and evolution of this market in the same way we did for virtualization. So today virtualization.info announces a sister publication: cloudcomputing.info

While virtualization.info will continue to track hardware, OS and application virtualization technologies, cloudcomputing.info will focus on the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) markets.
There will be some overlap around the IaaS market, as IaaS clouds are built on top of virtual infrastructures, and so you’ll see some cross-posting between the two sites.
Beyond that, cloudcomputing.info will expand our coverage, discussing new vendors and technologies that didn’t find a place here so far.

Feel free to visit the new website, subscribe the RSS feed or the email newsletter, follow the Twitter account, or like the Facebook page.

We hope you’ll enjoy our expanded coverage at cloudcomputing.info. Thanks to everyone for their support of virtualization.info over the last seven years!

P.s.: Just in case you are wondering:

1. we are hiring writers, for both publications. If you are interested please send a resume and a writing sample.
2. we are evaluating early sponsorships. If you are interested please send an inquiry.

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