“Enterprises’ need for public cloud is much different than startups,” Newvem CEO Zev Laderman told me yesterday. “Azure is exactly the perfect extension of the data center.”

Newvem is well-known for its Amazon Web Services offerings, offering startups optimization services, security checking, and overall cloud management — including the first-ever iPhone app for managing your cloud services. Now, Laderman said, the company is returning to its roots in enterprise with a similar offering for Azure. It’s the fruit of an 8-month effort, and it’s a signal that Microsoft’s cloud offerings are hitting a needed an lucrative market niche in a way that Amazon is not.

“Azure is a billion-dollar business,” Laderman says. “Azure is Microsoft’s best-kept secret in the enterprise.”

Newvem’s new offerings on Azure include visualization of your cloud costs, inventory, and usage trends, methods to create dynamic views of your cloud usage and align them to business objectives for very granular optimization recommendations, and pattern-recognizing tools that identify and highlight consumption patterns, such as regular peaks, bursts, and trends.

Private beta participant Linkury agrees, saying that Newvem for Azure gave the company “visibility into specific Windows Azure inventory that we use,” and that “it’s a great time-saver and has helped us to better plan and forecast our usage.”

Source: Newvem

Your cloud dashboard.

The lure of Azure, according to Newvem, is that Microsoft is already huge in the enterprise, and corporations can seamlessly move workloads between owned servers and cloud servers as required. So a company that begins a speculative new project can start serving its computing needs on Azure and then, once workloads stabilize, move the workload into the corporate data center.

That helps enterprises be as nimble and quick to market as startups, since projects can begin immediately without the need for purchase, installation, and configuration of owned hardware and software solutions. But it also enables enterprises to manage costs effectively. If the project isn’t successful, there’s no unused hardware left lying around. If it is, and if via Newvem’s optimization offerings IT management determines that costs could be lower in the data center, projects can easily be moved back inside the four walls.

To Laderman, that’s a key differentiator between Amazon and Azure.

“That’s important for Microsoft,” he says. “They win both ways, because they’re both in the cloud and in the enterprise.”

Source: Newvem

Your cloud utlization heatmap.

Microsoft is very “partner-centric” and has been a key supporter during the 8-month project, Laderman says, especially Bill Hilf, Microsoft’s general manager for Azure.

Microsoft is supporting Newvem in its enterprise marketing channels, will put Newvem’s solution in the Azure store, and will help Newvem go to market via joint sales efforts … all indicators of Microsoft’s commitment to deploying its cloud solutions in the enterprise, and partnering with companies who have complementary services.

Microsoft stock, which is down a penny today, jumped from under $30 to over $31 almost immediately overnight, and has climbed almost 11 percent over the last month. That’s part of a fairly steady rise over the last quarter which has added over $30 billion in value to the company.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Ubben said that Microsoft “is a dominant software company … and in the long term it will win out,” and that in five years, Microsoft’s investments in web and cloud could transform the company into the largest cloud company in the world. Just five days ago, Microsoft announced general availability of its Windows Azure Infrastructure Cloud — a cheaper cloud than Amazon and Rackspace. 

The company has had challenges with Windows 8 adoption which some have blamed for historically slow PC sales in the last quarter, although it is investing more in Windows 8 for tablets and smaller touch devices.

In any case, Microsoft appears to be doing something right. At least, if you can trust Wall Street.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Windows Azure Active Directory has processed more than 200 billion authentications for Microsoft services in two years, and it now processes an average of 4.7 billion logins a week, the company announced today.

Active Directory (AD) handles authentications for Windows Azure, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Windows Server Online Backup, and Windows Intune. Companies that sign up for Active Directory can use its cloud-based store for directory data and various identity services. Additionally, AD can let companies configure a single sign-on to “allow interoperability with their existing on-premises Active Directory environment.”

Microsoft has been notoriously shy to share key metrics about its Windows Azure growth. For a recent article outlining the Platform-as-a-Service market, Microsoft told me Windows Azure has “tens of thousands” of customers and that it had doubled its customers during the past 12 months.

But at least when it comes to Active Directory, which is processing 1 million logins every two minutes, this at least shows that Microsoft’s cloud can handle a ton of data flying around.

In a blog post today, Windows Azure GM Bill Hilf outlined a few other important details on Active Directory worth noting:

Windows Azure AD goes beyond the first party services delivered from Microsoft. It is being used by our customers and third party developers as well. By using Windows Azure AD we deliver cloud based authentication services for you at scale with fast response and, if desired, enable federation and synchronization with your existing on-premise Windows Server Active Directory (AD). This is important as Gartner estimates that 95% of organizations already have Active Directory deployed in their environment.

By connecting your existing Windows Server AD to Windows Azure AD you can manage a hybrid
environment that provides unified authentication and access management for both cloud and on-premise services and servers, eliminating the need to maintain new, independent cloud directories. In addition, Windows Azure AD supports multiple protocols and token types, therefore apps that use it can be accessed from any device that supports an industry standard web browser including smartphones, tablets, and multiple PC, desktop and server operating systems.

Clouds photo via Flickr/Nicholas A. Tonelli

Agawi, a cloud-gaming platform formerly known as iSwifter, has adopted Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud hosting to stream games to Windows 8 devices.

The deal means that it will be possible to enjoy games created for other platforms on Microsoft’s Windows 8 PCs and tablets, said Peter Relan, the executive chairman of Agawi in Menlo Park, Calif., in an interview with GamesBeat. Agawi will use Azure to stream Facebook social games and other titles to Windows 8 PCs and tablets, so that players can play “any game, anywhere, instantly.” (The initials for that phrase are the letters in the Agawi name.)

Windows Azure is a cloud-computing platform that Microsoft has set up to provide web-connected data center infrastructure to startups that need to accommodate lots of Internet users connecting to websites. Like Amazon Web Services, it is a “public cloud” service that enables startups and other companies to grow quickly without spending a lot on Internet infrastructure.

Agawi will use Azure to offer cloud streaming for all types of games — Facebook social games, midcore titles, and hardcore games — to all devices. Relan said that popular AAA titles will be made available in the coming months for instant play on Windows 8 devices with no rework for developers. As such, Agawi plans to offer the same kind of cloud-gaming service as OnLive, Gaikai (now owned by Sony), Playcast, and others. Relan is making the announcement at the Cloud Gaming U.S.A. conference in Burlingame, Calif.

“We have been having discussions with Microsoft for a while,” said Relan. “The two prongs are our adoption of Azure, so we can use the largest cloud provider to bring our solution to the market. The second thing is to add new clients with Windows 8.”

The advantage for users is that they will be able to instantly log in to their games and resume playing on any device even if developers have not taken the trouble to port a game to that device. The web-connected data center executes the game in its servers and then sends a stream of video down to the user’s tablet or computer. Agawi has previously streamed Facebook and web games to iPad tablets. Now it is expanding to include new platforms such as Windows 8 and beefier hardcore games with high-end 3D graphics on devices that would not otherwise be able to run them, said Relan.

Agawi’s aim is to stream games to tablets, TVs, and PCs. With new tablets coming out based on Windows 8, Microsoft will enable Agawi to hit even more platforms.

“We are looking forward to bringing not just social games, but PC games and console-quality content to new devices,” said Relan. “To do that, we have to run Windows in the cloud. What better way to do this than have the games run in the cloud and stream them?”

“Game developers want to focus on building great games, not worrying about back-end issues like scalability and platform management,” said Walid Abu-Hadba, the vice president at Microsoft. “With Windows Azure, Agawi 2.0 enables developers to make high-performance games easily accessible across devices with high-quality graphics and virtually instant game downloads. For gamers, Windows 8 delivers a fast, fluid, and no-compromise experience that opens the door to exciting new form factors.”

Agawi was started as part of Relan’s YouWeb incubator in Menlo Park, Calif.

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The market for platform-as-a-service (PaaS) companies will grow steadily in the next several years because of the potential for operational improvement and cost reduction, according to a just-released survey by Engine Yard.

Engine Yard competes heavily with Salesforce’s Force.com and Microsoft’s Azure to attract developers and companies to its platform-as-a-service. While Engine Yard does have a clear interest to say that the PaaS market will grow swiftly, it also has some authority in being a quickly growing PaaS startup that generated $28 million in revenue last year.

Mark Gaydos, Engine Yard’s SVP of marketing, told us that the biggest change in the market lately is that “enterprise is beginning to bite.” The many medium- and large-sized businesses investing in cloud services create an opening for PaaS companies, which deploy and host applications. (Click here to see what IaaS, PaaS and SaaS companies do.)

“It appears that most companies are looking to engage with the cloud to deploy more innovative customer-facing applications, such as SaaS, mobile, e-commerce, and social across a wide variety of languages,” the company writes in the conclusion of the survey. “While cost savings is a reason to consider using a PaaS, the desire to improve operational readiness and improve application functionality and uptime are more important to individuals responding to the survey.”

Check out the infographic below to see the major take-aways from the survey:

Top photo credit: Lightspring/Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform has been given a major update that will offer deep support to Linux-based developers, the company announced today in a blog post.

The update will bring Windows Azure to a new level of versatility in what it can offer developers of all stripes, and it will no longer be treated purely as a platform-as-a-service (PaaS). Azure will now have outlined elements that make it an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) as well. (See my cloud 101 primer to get a better handle on cloudy acronyms.) Ideally with the new IaaS focus in place, Microsoft can to peel off developers using Amazon’s ubiquitous cloud for their IaaS needs.

The full scope of what Microsoft will be offering with Azure now, as outlined by Microsoft server and cloud head Bill Laing, can be read through below:

• Windows Azure Virtual Machines — Virtual Machines give you application mobility, allowing you to move your virtual hard disks (VHDs) back and forth between on-premises and the cloud. Migrate existing workloads such as Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft SharePoint to the cloud, bring your own customized Windows Server or Linux images, or select from a gallery. As a common virtualization file format, VHD has been adopted by hundreds of vendors and is a freely available specification covered under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise.

• Windows Azure Virtual Network — Virtual Network lets you provision and manage virtual private networks (VPNs) in Windows Azure as well as securely extend on-premises networks into the cloud. It provides control over network topology, including configuration of IP addresses, routing tables and security policies and uses the industry-standard IPSEC protocol to provide a secure connection between your corporate VPN gateway and Windows Azure.

• Windows Azure Web Sites — Build web sites and applications with this highly elastic solution supporting .NET, Node.js, and PHP while using common deployment techniques like Git and FTP. Windows Azure Web Sites will also allow easy deployment of open source applications like WordPress, Joomla!, DotNetNuke, Umbraco, and Drupal to the cloud with a few clicks.

• New tools, language support, and SDK — Windows Azure SDK June 2012 includes new developer capabilities for writing code against the latest service improvements with updated support for Java, PHP, and .NET, and the addition of Python as a supported language on Windows Azure. Additionally, the SDK now provides 100% command line support for both Windows and Mac.

• Availability in New Countries — Availability of Windows Azure is being expanded to customers in 48 new countries, including Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, Egypt, South Africa, and Ukraine. Roll-out will be complete later this month, making Windows Azure one of the most widely available cloud platforms in the industry with offerings in 89 countries and in 19 local currencies.

Microsoft will be holding a full-fledged announcement tomorrow with a live webcast at 1 p.m. Pacific if you want to get a better look at the new Azure. The company will then release preview editions of the platform.

Photo illustration: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft has launched its second accelerator for cloud-related startups, the company announced today. This one is located in emerging tech startup hotbed Bangalore, India.

Ten startups will be selected and will start Sept. 3, 2012. For four months, they will get resources and have their shot to build a smart cloud product.

The new location comes just two months after Microsoft’s first-ever startup accelerator at Israel. Just like its Israeli endeavor, Microsoft’s Indian outpost will not offer straight up cash to its startups. Instead, they will get $60,000 in Windows Azure credit, space to work in, and access to mentors.

“Through this unique initiative, Microsoft is partnering with leading industry mentors to provide startups with the much-needed support they need to innovate and become successful businesses,” said Amit Chatterjee, Managing Director of Microsoft India R&D, in a statement. “We are not only providing them technical and business guidance and mentoring, but also connecting them to prospective VCs and investors. The success of this program will be measured by the success of these startups. Microsoft will have no stake in these companies.”

Any India-based startup that wants to take part in the accelerator can apply here.

Photo credit: Microsoft

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft and cloud communications startup Twilio have signed a deal to bring Twilio’s APIs to developers who use Windows Azure, the two companies announced today.

Azure is used by many companies to host and build web applications through Microsoft’s data centers. Naturally, some of those companies and developers using Azure could benefit from the cloud-based phone and SMS technologies that Twilio offers. On top of API access, the deal will give Azure developers a credit of 1,000 free text messages or inbound voice minutes. Interested developers can sign up here.

“In line with our commitment to serving developers, Windows Azure welcomes support from Twilio to make their voice and messaging APIs available on Windows Azure,” said Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, in a statement. “We’ve seen the innovation happening around Twilio, and we want to make it as easy as possible for Windows Azure developers to build great apps that use Twilio’s communications platform and take advantage of Windows Azure’s scalability, reliability, and flexibility.”

San Francisco-based Twilio has raised around $33 million to date, with its most recent funding totaling $17 million. Twilio recently revealed that part of that funding was humorously delivered via a touchtone term sheet created using Twilio’s API.

Cloud photo: basketman23/Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft has launched its first-ever startup accelerator at its Israel R&D Center, with an expressed purpose of helping young cloud-focused companies.

The Windows Azure Accelerator, which was first reported by TechCrunch, will provide space and mentoring like a normal accelerator, but there’s a catch. Instead of seed funds, Microsoft will give the selected companies free access to the Windows Azure cloud platform.

The accelerator acts as part of the Think Next and Microsoft BizSpark programs, which also help startups. Like Microsoft’s BizSpark Plus offering, startups in this new accelerator will get two free years of Azure access worth up to $60,000.

The Azure cloud platform is used by many companies to host and build web applications through Microsoft’s own data centers. In this situation, Microsoft is hoping to encourage Azure use with young companies.

Azure was recently hammered in the press for a wide outage on Feb. 29 that has been labeled as a “leap year bug.” However, Microsoft has since apologized for the outage and offered a nice 33 percent credit for the entire month of February to those using the Azure Compute, Access Control, Service Bus and Caching programs.

Microsoft plans to announce the first class from the Windows Azure Accelerator on April 22nd at Think Next 2012.

Microsoft Israel R&D center photo: Microsoft

Pushed by All About Microsoft, Microsoft has confirmed in a statement that Dave Cutler, the father of Microsoft’s Windows NT operating system, is now working on Xbox.

“Dave is one of our brightest minds and is currently working on projects that will help advance our goals in the consumer space as we continue to grow the Xbox from a game-centric console to a complete home entertainment device,” the Microsoft statement said.

Microsoft is reportedly working not only on expanding the non-gaming capabilities of the Xbox 360, it is also rumored to be working on a next-generation console. The company hasn’t acknowledged that, but it makes sense that it would move talented leaders to the group as it prepares for another round of the console cycle.

As reported by ZDNet, Cutler, a former Digital Equipment Corp. leader and programming wizard, specifically joined the ISS group working on Console Development research and development. That division is the Interactive Entertainment Business Software and Services group headed by Microsoft corporate vice president David Treadwell. The team’s objective is build out “connected entertainment experiences for consumers.” Cutler was profiled in the book about the making of Windows NT, Showstopper, by G. Pascal Zachary back in 1994.

Cutler previously was part of the core team working on the public cloud operating system Windows Azure. Could an entertainment cloud offering be in the offing?

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple’s iCloud runs on two services from its biggest competitors, Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s elastic cloud, reports The Register.

Sources tell the site that both Microsoft and Amazon were instructed to remain mum on the iCloud deal. Amazon’s elastic cloud is already established as a go-to service for any company that wants to offload data and other resources, but the deal serves as a major validation for Microsoft’s Windows Azure.

Writes The Register: “iCloud puts Azure into a different league, given the brand love for Apple and the Apple management’s fanatical attitude to perfection. It is a “huge consumer brand, a great opportunity to get Azure under a very visible workload,” our sources told us.”

Apple is likely aiming to avoid potential iCloud outages by selecting two cloud suppliers. The company has already had the headache of dealing with outages for its MobileMe service, which relied on a single external provider. Apple is also building its own massive data center in North Carolina, which could eventually take over some of the load for iCloud.

The Register notes that iCloud is thought to be running on Microsoft’s full Azure service, which includes the Azure compute and controller features, as well as its SQL storage. Data on iCloud is being striped across both Amazon and Microsoft’s services, a process which allows iCloud to speed up data access since it doesn’t have to rely on a single disk or service. To accomplish this, Apple, perhaps together with Microsoft and Amazon, has come up with some sort of solution for easily identifying and accessing data across both services.

The company will release a new Windows Azure tool kit for social game developers by the end of the week. The announcement shows that Microsoft wants to win over the allegiance of the developers that are making cutting edge social games, which live or die based on the quality of interaction between players and the games’ cloud-based data centers.

Nate Totten, technical evangelist for the Windows Azure team, said in an interview that Microsoft is releasing source code that makes it easy for developers to create games with built-in features such as authentication, gamer achievements, leaderboards, in-app purchases, monetization and other common requirements for social games. The platform is based on the HTML5 format for making cross-platform games.

“You just deploy it and it runs and it scales up as you add millions of users,” Totten (pictured right) said.

Microsoft also released a simple game, Tankster, that illustrates how to use the tools to create a two-dimensional game with a small amount of interaction. The platform is aimed at small developers who don’t have time to deal with a lot of the server-based code that has to support online games such as Facebook titles. Rival platforms includes Amazon’s web services platform, which offloads the server side of the business so developers can concentrate on their game code.

“If you just want to concentrate on the game and don’t want to deal with hosting or rebuilding your game for a lot of formats, then this is for you,” said David Appel (pictured left), director of marketing for Azure. “We’ve got a platform that is cost-effective for startups.”

Some companies that have developed games using Azure include Three Melons, which made a soccer game last year for the world cup. That game reached as many as 5 million users a month. The benefit of using HTML5 is that it can be used to make cross-platform games, but its disadvantage is slow performance and an inability to easily use platform-specific features such as a camera in smartphone games.

Incidentally, Dave Roberts, chief executive of PopCap, said that the promises of writing a game once and running it anywhere haven’t been fulfilled, even in the age of HTML5. But that’s not stopping companies from making that sales pitch to developers, and Microsoft is one of those delivering that pitch.

Thompson reiterated Microsoft’s position on Azure, which remains practically unchanged since it launched in October 2008: The company sees cloud computing as its next major computing platform beyond Windows and the internet. It’s planning to have cloud computing aspects built into everything they ship, and it’s also aiming to be more open with Windows Azure than any other Microsoft platform. “We believe we have the most open cloud on the planet,” Thompson said.

Microsoft foresees a world where users can run applications across its Azure platform and their own servers — as well as public clouds that we’ll see from government and healthcare organizations.

Thompson, who also spent 18 years at Sun Microsystems pursuing cloud computing initiatives, was mum on any major news announcements regarding Windows Azure. He did mention Microsoft’s Project Dallas — the company’s Information Services business which would create a marketplace for datasets. “Data will always have value, unlocking that data will always be an opportunity,” he said.

Though Microsoft has been slow to adopt recent computing trends like post-iPhone smartphones, it’s clearly looking forward to the next major computing zeitgeist with Azure and its increased focus on cloud computing. Azure is powering its new web-based Office applications, and there’s also the potential for it to be a major component in Windows Phone 7 services. Below is a video excerpt from Thompson’s talk with VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall.

Photo via DEMO’s Flickr, and Stephen Brashear Photography

Small and medium-sized companies looking to bring their business operations to the cloud but lacking the technical knowledge or resources to do it themselves may have just found a friend in new startup CloudBasic, which is unveiling a tool to move business operations from local servers to Internet-hosted services today at the DEMO conference in Silicon Valley.

The company claims it can help businesses to build, deploy and customize applications easier and more efficiently than existing cloud-enabled tools.

CloudBasic’s tool, developed using Microsoft’s .Net programming framework, helps companies move key elements of their day-to-day computing, such as Excel spreadsheets, to Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud hosting service. The company’s tools target nontechnical users. A tool dubbed CloudBasic AppSheets allows the user to create applications based on existing spreadsheet designs, in addition to mirroring existing references and calculations.

While the company appears to not have much competition in its Microsoft-centric niche, it does have several rivals focusing on Java, a programming framework now controlled by Microsoft rival Oracle. They include VMForce, a joint project from online-software provider Salesforce.com and virtualization software vendor VMware, as well as LongJump, which provides a platform for software-as-a-service offerings.

The Irvine, California-based company, founded in 2008 and privately funded to date, has signed up several customers, including an oil and gas company and manufacturing and logistics operations.

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