Microsoft to put all enterprise apps on the cloud

 

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By Barry Collins in Los Angeles

Posted on 27 Oct 2008 at 20:24

Microsoft certainly can't be accused of failing to practice what it preaches, with a pledge to launch cloud versions of all its enterprise apps.

The company today unveiled its cloud-computing OS, Windows Azure, and immediately followed it up with a guarantee to deliver all of its business apps online.

"All of our enterprise software will be delivered with an option as an online service," said David Thompson, corporate vice president of Microsoft Online, although he didn't give any indication of which applications will be included, nor provide any potential launch dates.

The move is part of Microsoft's "Software + Services" vision, although the company insists that businesses will still retain complete control over where their applications and data resides.

"The benefit of Software + Services is the power of choice," Thompson said. "Enterprises don't necessarily want all of one or the other [cloud or local servers]."

Nevertheless, Thompson was keen to point out the business benefits of hosted applications. "It's easier to stay up-to-date because we do it for them," he said. "And you can deploy new applications in minutes rather than months."

Moving business apps into the cloud

Companies won't have to rely purely on Microsoft's online applications. The Azure operating system will allow developers to port their own applications into the cloud.

"Azure provides an opportunity to seamlessly extend on-premise applications to the cloud," an executive from the Microsoft cloud-computing team told PC Pro.

"They keep what they have on premises and keep the architectural consistency with what they have on the cloud."

However, Microsoft admits that having all of its data centres initially hosted in the US might cause problems for international customers. "Anyone around the world can access these services," the executive said. "[Non-US] customers have to decide what kind of latency they can tolerate."

He said the company intends to make Azure resident in global data centres over time, but didn't give a specific timeframe.