It's not the first time Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella expressed how much he believed in the power of the cloud, but this time, the Microsoft head honcho aired his sentiments with an announcement that his company is fully jumping into the cloud business.
At a media event held in San Francisco on Monday, Microsoft unveiled a new cloud-in-a-box system that allows clients to access their own private clouds running on Microsoft Azure's public platform. Dubbed the Cloud Platform System (CPS), this hybrid cloud appliance is powered by software used for Azure, namely the HyperV hypervisor, Windows System Center and Azure Pack, and is stored in hardware developed in partnership with Dell.
CPS addresses concerns by companies and enterprises that the public cloud is not a fully secure platform for their business. Microsoft Azure chief technology officer Mark Russinovich says most businesses have trade secrets and legacy infrastructures that they want to keep secure on their own premises. CPS allows businesses to operate on their private cloud in a box while using the same robust management tools offered by Azure.
"This [CPS] enables customers to use Azure to deploy and run their applications close to their own customers, as well as their own employees than ever before," Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of cloud and enterprise at Microsoft, says.
Amazon, which is long recognized as the leader in infrastructure as a service systems, does not offer its own hybrid solution. Other cloud vendors, such as VMware, Rackspace and HP offer their customers the option to work on their own private clouds by giving them access to their public cloud management tools. However, Microsoft believes the only true cloud players, and thus the only competitors to watch out for, are Amazon and Google.
Microsoft thinks it has what it takes to eventually overturn the competition, given how rapid Azure is growing. Nadella himself says Azure has been bringing in a total of $4.4 billion in yearly revenue coming from 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies, such as NBC, retailer Paul Smith and elevator company ThyssenKrupp, who prefer to do business on Azure. To put that in perspective, both Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com had revenue of $4 billion each last year. Nadella also says Azure already has 350 million clients signed up, and Microsoft is adding up to 10,000 new customers each week, with 40 percent of all clients comprising independent software developers and startups.
Aside from CPS, Microsoft also introduced the Intel Xeon-powered G line of virtual machines, which Microsoft says has twice the memory of Amazon's virtual machines and has four times more storage than Google's, with the Premium Storage offering up to 32TB of space with 50,000 IOPS (input/outputs per second). And to show its love for Linux, Microsoft announced Linux support for Azure with the introduction of its new CoreOS machines. This is in keeping with Nadella's strategy to develop Microsoft products that are compatible with all platforms, not just on Windows.
"Our ecosystem is the backbone of our cloud platform, and our embrace of open source technologies is at the heart," says Guthrie. "By helping to create an open platform powered by choice and flexibility, we are enabling the enterprises and developers of today and tomorrow to connect with each other and create new business opportunities in the mobile-first, cloud-first world."
Microsoft is also expanding Azure to more places in the world and will be opening new data centers in Australia this month. By the end of the year, Microsoft hopes to have opened 19 new Azure facilities all over the globe.
