Amazon has a major new challenger in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) space – Microsoft. The Redmond giant recently announced that Azure was no longer just a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering.
But taking on a company that has such a strong grip on the public compute cloud market is going to be a tall ask of Microsoft.
At LeWeb 2012 in London this week, we caught up with Dan Scarfe, CEO and co-founder of one of Microsoft’s biggest cloud partners Dot Net Solutions, to talk about how Microsoft can challenge the behemoth that is Amazon.
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So the answer is, Microsoft ISN'T going to compete with Amazon.
This guy echoes the Microsoft spokesman in your earlier interview. Microsoft and its partners believe that for any question, the answer is Windows.
So if the cloud comes along, what users want is a great big cloud version of Window called Azure. Any other operating system is "legacy".
This leaves Amazon to take the lion's share of the real world by hosting any kind of OS in real IaaS.
Interseting though to see Microsoft presented as open under the covers....
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/interview/microsoft-windows-azure-iaas-is-not-for-new-apps-82563
Hi Dave,
Interesting viewpoint - remember that Microsoft is opening up when it comes to operating systems though: http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/microsoft-ports-linux-to-azure-81337
Tom Brewster
Deputy Editor
Dave, In fact, the point I was making was quite the opposite, that we had recognised that not everyone does want to use Windows or .NET and that's why we've opened up the IaaS side so you can host whatever operating system image a customers wants to, including Linux. On our new websites platform we support Wordpress, Drupal and a number of other open source CMS platforms. We have partners hosting mySQL available natively in the platform.
Microsoft does now get it and we're really hopeful the community will see our commitment and perhaps the vision of the old Microsoft will start to fade.