Microsoft Partner conf -Is cloud the answer? July 14th

By Jari Saarhelo

Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference Los Angeles – July 10th – 14th

The conference this year gathered a huge audience of 15 000 visitors to listen to the latest and greatest developments from Microsoft. A great line-up of executives from Microsoft, their partners and customers was present. It was all about cloud computing with Azure and succeeding together with the partners.

Migrating to cloud can bring huge productivity gains, whether it is Microsoft’s Azure or Amazon cloud or something else. Some of the key benefits are:

Instant access to a worldwide back-end infrastructure. Cloud computing removes the lead time required to setup a back-end system. The infrastructure is there and you can start leveraging that as soon as your software is ready to do that. A traditional up-front investment is replaced with operating costs, which occur only when you are already running a billable service.

Pay only for capacity used. There is no need to commit to a certain amount of back-end capacity in advance. Instead, you can instantly expand the capacity, if the need should occur, which means that you can respond much better to the real needs of your customers. The whole capacity planning problem of the traditional back-end systems is removed – before cloud if you reserved too much capacity you had an extra cost, if you reserved too little, you had dissatisfied customers.

Availability and scalability. You don’t need to organize and manage hosting and worry about availability and scalability of your system – it is there and works.

Cloud services reduce the barrier of entry and the cost for offering a global service, which means that there will be lots of new cloud enabled applications coming to the market. The small and medium sized enterprises will be able to enter a market, which was practically closed for them before.

And you? If you are not using cloud right now, I bet you are in a year from now.