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Microsoft Opens Windows to Cloud Computing

R. Colin Johnson | Date: 11-23-10 | Comments

Amazon may still have the largest cloud computing platform, but Microsoft's Azure is growing more quickly, signing up major accounts, and giving scientists and researchers free access just for switching from Linux to Windows.

Microsoft is making a major effort to reinvent itself as a provider of software-as-a-service (SaaS), promising to shift the majority of its engineering efforts away from PC-centric computing to cloud computing�turning its popular Windows platform into a smart terminal for its online applications and storage regimes in the cloud called Azure.

Azure applications run in Microsoft data centers and are accessed via the Internet.

Azure provides the foundation for running Windows-based SaaS applications in a cloud computing environment maintained by Microsoft's data centers. Unveiled over five years ago, Azure finally became a commercial reality in October, and has already signed significant new customers, including Toyota Motor, 3M, Lockheed Martin, the city of New York and Integrator Computer Science (on behalf of the state of California). European customers include the VENUS-C (Virtual Multidisciplinary EnviroNments USing Cloud Infrastructures) consortium, France's National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA), and the University of Nottingham Horizon Institute.

Microsoft is also winning the hearts and minds of the scientific research community by providing free access to Azure during its first year of operation (after which Microsoft will re-evaluate whether to start charging non-commercial scientific users).

Azure is three years behind Amazon, which is already generating half a billion dollars in sales from cloud-based services. Besides Amazon and Microsoft, Google, Salesforce.com and IBM are also offering SaaS that allow customers to store and run programs on server farms in the cloud.

Azure has five main parts: Compute, Storage, the Fabric Controller, Content Delivery Network and Connect.

For IT installations that already have extensive computer centers, software suites like the vSphere platform from VMware provide the software glue that allows private cloud services to be run on a company's own server farms�a viable alternative to SaaS. However, pay-as-you-go in general and Microsoft's Azure in particular are gaining significant ground of late�at least judging from the caliber of the world-class companies signing up. Microsoft is also leveraging Windows dominance at most Fortune 100 companies by actively integrating cloud-access capabilities into the popular OS.

The strategy is paying off, too. For instance, Toyota says it plans to connect its customers' requests for roadside assistance to the Azure cloud, tracking the calls it receives daily from Lexus owners whose cars have broken down or been involved in traffic accidents. Likewise, 3M is using the Azure SaaS model for its Visual Attention Service, which accesses the impact of Web design on users by tracking which parts of Web pages people are viewing most.

Perhaps Microsoft's most cunning strategy, however, is to provide free access to scientists and researchers during the first year of operation of Azure. In October 2011, Microsoft will re-evaluate whether to start charging scientists to use Azure. In the meantime, hundreds of scientific cloud-computing tasks will migrate from Linux to Windows just to get access to the free SaaS�giving Microsoft a significant leg-up in scientific computing.