Leading the Enterprise Cloud Era

The following is a post from Satya Nadella, President of the Server & Tools Business at Microsoft.


Today, I sent an internal mail to Microsoft employees to kick off a wave of product updates we are delivering to our customers and partners at TechEd North America 2013. The purpose of my mail was to share both the progress we have made and encourage all of our more than 90,000 employees to keep pushing in our efforts to revolutionize the enterprise cloud landscape.

I am sharing this email with you, our customers, partners and media, to provide context on the transformation we have made, and to highlight Microsoft’s deep focus and commitment on the cloud. I encourage you to tune into the TechEd keynote, read the press release and sign up to receive preview software as it becomes available over the upcoming weeks.

It’s an exciting time for Microsoft, our customers, and the industry. We are entering a new era, and I look forward to sharing more as we continue this journey together.

Satya

Leading the Enterprise Cloud Era

Today at TechEd North America we’ll unveil key developments that signal just how far we’ve come as a leader in the enterprise cloud. We are announcing a new wave of Windows Azure services, a significant update to our server line-up (Windows Server, System Center, SQL Server) and new tools (Visual Studio) all built for the cloud.

Two years ago we bet our future on the cloud and quietly refocused our 19 billion-dollar software business by completely transforming our products, culture and practices to be cloud-first. We knew the journey would be long and challenging with plenty of doubters. But we forged ahead knowing that the cloud transition would change the face of enterprise computing.

As it turns out we were right to take this risk. Because of the fundamental shifts the cloud brings, more than 2 trillion dollars of overall IT spend is now up for grabs. It starts with the rapidly exploding world of devices and a new generation of connected apps that are revolutionizing life and business. Software-driven datacenters are making access to computing resources infinite and elastic. Big Data is changing the way we gain insight and act in business, science and society. Cloud is the central architectural paradigm that makes all of this possible.

By applying this architectural approach to Microsoft’s own diverse set of internet-scale properties (Bing, Xbox Live, Office 365, SkyDrive, etc.) we’ve gained priceless insights into what it means to be truly enterprise-grade. By living this new paradigm first-hand, we have been able to build a cloud platform that spans IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. We also are unique in that we make our “secret sauce” of cloud infrastructure available to customers and partners to build and operate their own clouds. This is THE most encompassing vision in the industry and far exceeds what our competitors can say.

To enable this transformation we had to make deep changes to our organizational culture, overhauling how we build and deliver products. Every one of our division’s nearly 10,000 people now think and build for the cloud – first. Our engineers live a “live-site” first culture to better respond to our customers in real time. And we are laser-focused on building more complete end-to-end service scenarios, or modern workloads, to deliver more value to our customers and partners.

We are already seeing this bet deliver substantial returns. Windows Azure is going through hyper-growth. Half the Fortune 500 companies are using Windows Azure. We have over 1,000 new customers signing up every day and over 30,000 organizations have started using our IaaS offering since it became available in April. We are the first multinational company to bring public cloud services to China. Ultimately we support enormous scale, powering some of the largest SaaS offerings on the planet.

By providing the power of Azure in our server offerings we are able to take share from enterprise incumbents. For example, Hyper-V has taken 4 points of competitive share in the last 12 months and our Datacenter Editions across Windows Server and SQL Server continue to grow in double digits. This all adds up to an enterprise cloud business that is at significant scale.

The announcements this week at TechEd are great examples of the above strategy and culture continuing to pay off. At TechEd we will demonstrate how we are enabling customers to:

· Transform their infrastructure through software-driven datacenters across private clouds, service provider clouds and Windows Azure

· Get more insights from data with a complete data platform, the powerful in-memory capabilities of SQL Server Hekaton and rich new BI capabilities

· Build applications using new services like business process integration, tools for dev-test, cloud-based source control, build, load testing and team collaboration capabilities

· Adopt new devices in the enterprise with unified device management for Windows 8.1 and all other modern devices

This is an incredibly exciting time. While this week’s announcements demonstrate just how much progress we have made in the last two years, the journey is far from over. We have a huge opportunity as a company serving our enterprise customers with our devices and services. Together we can lead the enterprise cloud era.

Satya

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