After its last high-profile cloud-computing launch, the Office 365, Microsoft has announced that Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, its cloud-based CRM offering, will be available worldwide.

Remember when Steve Ballmer made this statement? "About 70 percent of our folks are doing things that are entirely cloud-based, or cloud inspired," he told an audience at the University of Washington last March. "And by a year from now that will be 90 percent."

At the time I thought: Yeah, right.

The cloud is so difficult to define, and Microsoft's cloud offerings had been so slow to emerge, I couldn't bring myself to believe that claim, especially with Ballmer's "cloud inspired" location leaving several football fields of wiggle room. For those reasons and more, two weeks ago I pretty much dismissed the announcement of the forthcoming Microsoft Office 365 as a repackaging of Microsoft BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services), a cloud offering that has failed to get much traction.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced Wednesday morning a large-scale IT agreement will deliver Microsoft cloud computing services to 30,000 city employees while also consolidating the city’s licensing agreements into a single, unified system.

The agreement will replace the city’s prior licensing arrangements, which were conducted individually by city agencies, and according to Bloomberg, were “complicated, cumbersome, and needless to say, not very cost effective.” The mayor said the agreement will yield significant savings for the city going forward. “Central to this partnership is a new licensing agreement — the first of its kind — we think in the nation, which will produce more than $50 million in savings for the city in the next five years,” Bloomberg said in a news conference.

The agreement will allow the city to leverage its buying power to consolidate agreements into one single, multi-year licensing contract that will be made available to more than 100,000 city employees.

In an interview, the president of Microsoft's Server and Tools Division explains what firms should do now to prep for a move to the cloud

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says the software giant is "all in" when it comes to cloud computing and he's relying on Bob Muglia to play the hand in this high-stakes game. As president of the nearly $15 billion Server and Tools Division of Microsoft, Muglia controls key data center products like Windows Server, SQL Server, and System Center, as well as the Windows Azure PaaS (platform-as-a-service) offering that is a key underpinning of the company's cloud strategy.

In this interview with IDG Enterprise Chief Content Officer John Gallant and InfoWorld.com Editor in Chief Eric Knorr, Muglia talked about how customers are making the move to cloud and what they need to be doing right now. He also staked Microsoft's claim to leadership in the emerging cloud market, talked about the Windows Azure private-cloud appliance, and explained what customers can learn from the City of Los Angeles' challenges using Google Apps.

For more than a decade, Microsoft's Internet Explorer has been the predominant tool the world uses to connect to the Web, but that's no longer true, according to a Web analytics firm.

StatCounter, which tracks Internet data, said that IE's share of the browser market fell to 49.9% in September. More people still use IE than any other single browser, but the combined market share of non-Microsoft browsers now outpaces IE.

Microsoft once commanded more than 90% of the browser market, rising to dominance by preloading IE on Windows computers. That sent Netscape, the browser king of the 1990s, tumbling into irrelevancy. It also prompted antitrust suits against Microsoft in both the United States and the European Union, the latter of which forced the company to offer Windows users a list of browsers to choose from when they set up the operating system.

That, along with the fact that other browsers have outpaced IE's innovations, has led Mozilla's Firefox, Google's Chrome and Apple's  Safari browser to eat away at Microsoft's market share. Internet Explorer's use has been falling steadily over the past several years.

Microsoft is all set to present at the UP 2010 conference, which is an annual review of cloud computing developments, the cloud's impact on world economy and society, as well as an aggregation point for the study of future trends in the Cloud space.

Key topics to be addressed at UP 2010 conference will include;

- Cloud for Business Computing,

- Cloud for Public / Government Sector,

- Industry Implementation Insights,

- Legal, Security and Privacy matters.

- Cloud Management & ICT Best Practices

“We are delighted to work with Microsoft on our UP 2010 Cloud Conference, as our Headline Diamond Partner for the event” said, Cloudcor and UP 2010 Chairman Khazret Sapenov. “Microsoft brings proven expertise and know-how on Public Cloud offerings, which we are confident will educate delegates attending the UP 2010 conference; physically in West-Coast on Day 1, as well as senior level delegates in Public / Private sector enterprises; tuning in virtually from around the world”

In searching for coverage from VMworld in San Jose, I came across this press release...

Wyse Unveils Expanded Strategy for Cloud Client Computing, Mobile Cloud Business Unit

Thin, Zero, and Cloud PC Client Offerings Combined with Integrated Management, Desktop Virtualization and Cloud Software Delivering the Most Complete and Secure Unified Communications Platform for True Cloud Computing

Mobile Cloud Business Unit to Focus on Management, Desktop Virtualization and Cloud Software on Next Generation Mobile Platforms

Microsoft's Matt Thompson on the Evolution of PaaS

Matt Thompson is a General Manager of Developer & Platform Evangelism at Microsoft. Based in Silicon Valley, he and his team look after the "care and feeding" for the communities of developers, startups and IT Pros across the western US. Prior to joining Microsoft, Matt worked for several years on developer tools—debuggers, compilers etc—at Sun Microsystems. He then cut his teeth at a couple of startups before landing back at Sun just when Java was being released for the very first time. Matt led the group that drove Java adoption worldwide for 12 years. Even before the term "Cloud Computing" became popular, Matt was involved at Sun with grid computing, utility computing, and more recently lead part of a large cloud engineering group—which focused on several things including how to componentize large servers and how to build a Platform-as-a-Service—along with his other responsibilities in developer tools and Java evangelism.
I spoke with Matt about the evolution of Platform-as-a-Service and Microsoft's cloud strategy. Matt explained what is exactly meant by Microsoft's "Services plus Software" and Steve Ballmer's "We are all the in cloud" messages. He shared valuable information about current and future product-line strategies and roadmaps and how they align with Microsoft's overall cloud vision.

Here are some excerpts from the conversation:

Where are the drivers behind the evolution of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) industry and how do you see this market evolving?

If you look at the cloud market today, you will see some companies building private cloud components and some companies building just public clouds. I believe Microsoft is the only company with the most complete cloud vision that combines all layers of the cloud stack and also offers a number of flexible deployment options.
It all began with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) introducing a pay-as-you-go consumption model, which is great but it is hard to get the economics and quality-of-service exactly right. You could end up building too much or too little infrastructure, thus spending too much on infrastructure or compromising on your quality-of-service. Building a perfect SaaS model with all the attendant economic benefits, quality-of-service, multi-tenancy, pay-as-you-go pricing, etc is interesting, but invariably customers will come up with something else they need. For example, they might want to build on top of those services, add something to the side, or integrate with some other proprietary services. That's when you start thinking about Platform-as-a-Service. If you just have SaaS or Infrastructure-as-Service (IaaS), that's an incomplete business model without the PaaS component.

I clearly see the industry moving in the direction where PaaS becomes the sweet spot. Almost every cloud company will find that they will be driven by customer and market forces to move in that direction. Examples abound in the industry. Amazon started out as a pure IaaS player and if you look at the new services they are offering, they are clearly starting to look more like a platform. VMware with their recent acquisitions (Springsource) are looking to build a more complete platform than just staying with the virtualization play. SalesForce is rapidly making the transition from a pure SaaS (CRM) company to more of a PaaS player with their Force.com platform.
At Microsoft, with Azure, we see Platform-as-a-Service as critical piece because that's where we can attract the developers and the ecosystem around them. I came to Microsoft because I think Azure is the next great platform that developers can build interesting applications with new business models.

How mature are the current PaaS offerings in the marketplace and how are companies adopting the technology?

I think Platform-as-a-Service is still early. We have seen Salesforce go from a pure SaaS CRM company to more of a platform player where many of its CRM customers (and some ISV's) are building applications around their Force.com platform. If you are a small business and are looking to extend your Salesforce CRM functionality, for example, one of the very first things you would look at is the Force platform because the cost efficiencies and time-to-value are too compelling to ignore.
The adoption of PaaS will be mainly driven by the developer ecosystem which builds interesting applications and that in turn will generate demand for the PaaS to grow. I think larger enterprises will lag behind the SMB market in PaaS adoption. That said, in the Microsoft Azure case, we are starting to see some major Fortune 500 companies developing significant applications. For example, as one of the early adopters, Coca Cola began by experimenting with Azure early on. Now they have gone all the way from a prototype to a full solution where they make data available to their distributors. Domino's Pizza did the same kind of thing.
So we are starting to see some adoption within larger enterprises. However, we won't see classic enterprise apps moving completely to PaaS, rather we will see a lot of new development happening there. That trend is inescapable and will continue for the next several years. Eventually we will see a tipping point where we will begin to see some large Enterprise Applications—which you would normally expect to see in the data center—running in the cloud.

What is the meaning of Microsoft's "Software + Services" and Steve Ballmer's "We are all in the Cloud" messages?

The Services piece of the statement refers to the public cloud. At Microsoft, we built a large instance of the public cloud through Azure where we run most of our own internal services including exchange e-mail, hotmail, etc and also host these services for our customers. We already have pieces of Microsoft Office 2010 etc running in the cloud. Those are all services in the SaaS space. When you look at PaaS, the public instance is Windows Azure. We are working actively with our partner community to drive broad Azure adoption through our ISV base. We are also working on providing Data-as-a-Service where we make very large amounts of valuable data available (similar to data.gov) in the cloud and more importantly build a marketplace around it so that any data provider can build a new revenue stream around the valuable data they may have that was locked away and vaulted for years.
The Software piece of that statement refers to the private cloud. To us, a private cloud is taking the exact same technology in Azure and delivering it to our customers for use within their own datacenters. We do that in two ways: one way is through an Azure appliance we recently announced, and the second way is through packaged software.
The Azure appliance is essentially a cloud in a box that large government agencies and enterprises can use within their own firewall to run sensitive applications which they can't otherwise run in a public cloud due to security, data privacy, compliance, or regulatory reasons. In fact, the Azure appliance is a mobile container that can be shipped around easily and can be used to augment an existing datacenter. The appliance is a perfect solution for those companies looking to add extra capacity to their data centers—no matter where there are located—during certain peak demand days that occur during the month or year. It's not inconceivable that these appliances would be made available for lease by our distributors and partners in the not-too-distant future.
As we go forward, when customers upgrade to our upcoming versions of Windows servers, SQL servers, Hyper-V virtualization, and cloud management technologies, they will be running the same underlying cloud technologies that Microsoft is running in their public cloud. The Platform piece of Azure gets bound into Windows server and SQL Azure gets bound into the SQL server.
Then we have AppFabric which is coming soon for the server software which allows you to easily manage the virtualized components of your applications. By this summer, we will have better virtualization capabilities in Azure making it extremely easy to move virtualized instances of your application back and forth between your data center and the public Azure instance. For example, you can build an application on the public Azure platform and then easily deploy it into full-scale production within your datacenter.
Microsoft, to my knowledge, is the only company that is delivering private cloud infrastructure that matches its public cloud instance. This is the cloud-based product line strategy for the entire server infrastructure. We have really aligned our entire software licensing and software strategy to the cloud and this is the real meaning of Steve Ballmer's message "We are all in the Cloud."

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