Microsoft may be coming second place to Amazon’s $10 billion web services juggernaut especially when looked at from the world of computing, however, Microsoft has an edge that it can use and this is using its existing customer base that is quite large to sell their products to.
With its Windows Server business that creates room for its users to carry their existing investment in data center to Azure and be able to access supercomputing power that is functionally unlimited by mere adding the number on their credit card.
Amazon and Google are now working to get the highest share of the deals by creating software for data centers for companies even with Google seeming to be coming in third place after Amazon.
From what we have observed, it is the direct opposite of the model for public cloud that Google and Amazon use as business. It was admitted that although cloud computing is the in thing at the moment, not all customers are that willing to move their data to the cloud. Privacy issues, concerns about data governance and regulatory are some of the reasons some customers will prefer to keep their data to themselves.
This is not a setback for Google since back in July of 2015, the company partnered with OpenStack in an effort to make available a free alternative open source to Amazon web services that will operate in data center.
The company has since then been working together with OpenStack Mirantis startup to be able to make some improvement on the technology. Diane Green, new Google boss for cloud computing has declared the company’s readiness to go to any extent to be competitive.
On the other hand, the situation is raising some concerns for Amazon, because according to Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, the ‘hybrid cloud’ that entails that some data of the customer be stored in data center and others on ‘public cloud’ which is what Amazon offers knowing that companies seems to prefer AWS services for their outsourcing IT infrastructure.
Although there are some products that are cloud-enabling being offered by Amazon web services such as the Storage Gateway of AWS, which focuses on making the process of moving data to Amazon cloud instead of working on software that will help the users manage it themselves.
What it means is that Amazon has really started taking the market of tasking engineers who are working out on-premises software serious. This is why there is little wonder that Microsoft has concentrated on improving its sale and building technology so that it can meet up with the gap that Amazon has created and close it.
Microsoft intends to use the Azure Stack to accelerate its strategy for hybrid cloud come 2017. This will enable its users install a copy of the Microsoft Azure cloud that is a carbon copy to some designated servers that are pre-certified so as to make it much easier to merge the two.
