eWeek Predictions on Windows Azure in 2009

Clint Boulton at eWeek makes his own predictions for cloud computing in 2009, and discusses those made by others.

"Then again, the task before Microsoft is unprecedented in the era of Web-driven software. I do know that if Microsoft fails to impress the Windows developers, it will severely damage the company. Microsoft can't afford this kind of failure, so I expect Azure to wow folks and offer flexible, competitive pricing to challenge Google, Salesforce.com and Amazon Web Services."

Although I am new to Microsoft, I hear repeatedly from people who have been around a while that we are making some of the most significant investments of talent and money in many years.  There is a very high level of confidence that Windows Azure is going to deliver, and an engineering team focused on customer feedback and incorporating that feedback collected through the CTP into the new service.

Boulton also made the point:

"Microsoft's SAAS will complement its on-premise apps until customers are ready to move entirely into the cloud. When will that be. If I knew that... well, I'd be the predictions market."

The feeling inside the Azure team is that most customers, especially enterprise customers, are not going to be shutting down their own data centers and moving entirely into the cloud anytime soon.  Instead, we anticipate customers to move some data and applications into the cloud over time, but at an accelerating pace, as they become more comfortable with the idea.  Our expectation was that the technology will be ready for a massive shift into the cloud before enterprise customers wanted to do so.  But, we still might be surprised by the pace of the adoption of enterprise customers.  Even in an early CTP stage we are seeing a surprising number of inquiries from enterprise customers.  It could be the economy and budget constraints are causing enterprise IT managers to consider alternatives they not have before