Windows Azure is not a good candidate to be sold as a standalone product, according to Microsoft Server and Tools division head Bob Muglia.
Azure, the company's operating system for the cloud, only runs in Microsoft's datacentres, rather than being offered as a standalone product that could run in a company's own datacentre.
In an interview on Tuesday, Muglia said the main reason for this is that Azure is not built to offer choice. Because Microsoft knows exactly the hardware that will run on Azure, it hasn't built it to support different kinds of hardware or software.
"Windows Azure obviously runs in our own datacentre," Muglia said. "It is very much restricted. It only needs to run the hardware that we are trying to run on. It's not really appropriate for us to deliver it to customers in that form."
Businesses and hosted services companies will want to offer their own clouds, he said, and Microsoft will have tools for them, but Azure is not their answer. Instead, he said, Windows Server, System Center and Virtual Machine Manager will get a lot better at operating in a cloud-based environment, while still offering customers lots more choice.
"We will be taking our Virtual Machine Manager product and evolve it over time to much more straightforwardly allow customers to build their own private cloud," Muglia said.
Just because they will remain separate products, though, does not mean there will not be overlap between the Azure and Windows Server teams, he said. He noted that Windows Server 2008 R2, the version of Windows 7 for the server, has the ability to boot from a virtual hard drive — a feature developed by the Windows Azure team. Conversely, Azure supports applications written in PHP, a feature that it was able to offer because of work the Windows Server team had done in its last release.
Both Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Azure are set for release in the coming months. Microsoft announced Azure pricing on Tuesday and said it will launch commercially at Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference in November. Meanwhile, Windows Server 2008 R2 is set to be available to volume licence customers on 1 September, the same time as Windows 7.
Microsoft rival Salesforce.com on Tuesday gave its view on Azure. "When Microsoft, the company that has the most to lose from cloud computing, enters the market, you know that 'The End of Software' has arrived," Salesforce.com vice preseident of strategy Bruce Francis said in an email. "However, instead of solving the problems of the cost and complexity of client server, Microsoft is just moving those problems to the cloud. We believe that Azure will do for cloud computing what the Zune has done for media players."
But Muglia said that Azure is leading the way by allowing companies a way to move to the cloud that does not make them create whole new ways of writing software.
"There are many millions of customers today that are running very business critical applications today in the server environment," Muglia said. "We are focused on providing those customers with a smooth easy on-ramp into the cloud where they can leverage their skills and get the scale-out benefits the cloud will provide."
