Customers are willing to pay out for 'trusted providers' in the Cloud such as Microsoft even if they will insist on flirting with the likes of Google at first.
That was the sabre-rattling assertion from Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft Business Division, at the firm's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Washington last week. “A year ago there was a lot of discussion about the competitive dynamics, particularly as it related to Google's aspirations to somehow trans-mutate itself into an enterprise provider,” he said. “In other words, they wanted to move to a world where customers actually sign a contract, pay money, and therefore expect results.
“A year later, customers are speaking, and they are speaking with their wallets. Unambiguously, customers say they value companies like Microsoft and all of you who do understand what businesses need, who do recognise what it means to provide real customer support, who do worry about accessing documents created with the previous version of their software or who do preserve critical features from one day to the next, not having them disappear.”
Elop argued that Microsoft's “shared experience” with its customers means that that it can claim to be a “trusted provider” in a way that Google cannot. “You know what, it turns out that businesses really do value services from companies that understand what it takes to support the enterprise, and they are willing to pay for it,” he said. “Customers like Starbucks and Kraft, Serena Software, the University of Arizona, and many, many others have looked at and some even went over to Google, but you know what, today, they are all Microsoft customers, full stop. The competitive success that we are all having is unambiguous, it's amazing.
“Already we have more than 40 million seats of online services, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Communications Online, Forefront, Live Meeting, and others, all of those, more than 40 million,” he added. “The interesting thing is when you look at what customers are doing, certain customers are now committing to and deploying hundreds of thousands of seats at a time. We had one education customer that over the course of a weekend moved over something like 400,000 seats to the Cloud in one shot. It's just amazing the momentum that is building, and clearly it is no longer a question of if but when one of our customers should move to the Cloud.”
Top of the agenda
While once Microsoft executives steered clear of discussing the concept of Cloud Computing and applications delivered 'as a service', now the C-word is everywhere and dominates every conversation “When we first started talking at WPC about the move to the Cloud, many [partners] said' just don't do it', not because in some senses [they] were anti-new technology, but this is a scary move,” admitted Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “The Cloud does change and makes us reinvent our business models, yours and ours. But it's a change that's inevitable. It's a change that allows us all to deliver new value. It's a change that, thankfully, is not happening overnight, and it is a change that I think we have well embraced together.”
Cloud Computing is not just for smaller firms, insisted Ballmer. “We are not at a phase where we're just seeing small companies take experimental steps into the Cloud. This opportunity is real and concrete and available to all of us today,” he said. “Microsoft and our partners together are helping companies move to the Cloud [such as] Starbucks, McDonald's, Quark, 3M, Nokia, GlaxoSmithKline, Aon, and the list goes on and on.
“For all of us, for Microsoft, for our partners, for our customers, the Cloud creates new opportunities and new responsibilities. The Cloud really does give a new set of facilities, marketplace services, distribution services, customisation services, that will open up for all of us in this room a set of new markets and a set of new customers.”
Ballmer concluded: “The Cloud enables us, all of us, to help our customers streamline their operations and improve their agility. In some senses I think we all know for our customers their mission No. 1 is to take cost out of the ongoing operations and maintenance of IT so they can invest more in new scenarios and new applications.
“Because of what the Cloud, both technologies like Azure, as well as the Microsoft Online Services, can mean for the customer, we can remove many of those costs and much of that complexity, and enable more of the value-add that all of you bring to our customers to focus in on the new applications and new scenarios our customers want to embrace, that business value that all IT directors and managers talk about.”
