Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie made some interesting predictions on the future of cloud computing at J.P. Morgan’s Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in Boston today (see below for the full transcript). Ozzie says that while the IT community is in the very early stages of cloud computing innovations, the future for companies’ data hosting will be in the mixture of cloud computing and on-premise data centers.
“But the high level pattern, which really I think we would all agree on, is that at some point in time every major enterprise, every company, every ISV is going to have some blend of software that runs on-premises and some that runs in the cloud, and everyone wants tools that they can use to in essence deploy some apps to part of their organization that might be in the cloud, another part of their organization that might be on-premises, to do that on an application by application or region by region by region or program by program basis.”
Ozzie continues that Microsoft is in an optimal position to be the provider of both cloud computing services and on-premise data solutions, especially considering the company’s release of their cloud computing platform Microsoft Azure, which is expected to be released at the end of this year. Ozzie forecasts that cloud computing will be a have the biggest impact on Microsoft services like Exchange and SharePoint, the server programs that support MS Office.
He highlighted five significant areas where Microsoft will be leading competitors like Amazon-experience, technology, partners, developers, and customer momentum. Emphasizing the dual strength of Microsoft’s platforms and applications, Ozzie says that the company is positioned well to be a cloud computing provider because of its lengthy experience serving both the consumer and enterprise spaces.
The full transcript is embedded below: