Not negative on 'Clouds'

Is the ‘Cloud’ era disruptive to ISVs like Microsoft or is it a next step in evolution?

It’s the latter. For us, it’s a new delivery model. We can hand this new platform to our partners. Enterprise market is opening up and in the last four-to-five years, we have built up quite some momentum in this area. We are not looking at it negatively at all. We are looking at the opportunity factor.

There are many other potholes to ‘Clouds’ apart from security concerns - Elasticity, services levels, availability, control, and application latency to name a few. How are they being tackled?

In the Azure platform offered by Microsoft, any developer can build an application and check long-term availability patterns. This ability is provisioned inside the platform. Cloud offers a lot of flexibility if leveraged the right way. In fact at Microsoft, we offer developers a lot of exciting, compelling tools and features to help them create applications that are ahead-of-the-curve in this new interoperable and open world. It’s not just Cloud API projects, or our progress with Interoperability Executive Council or many other projects on inter-cloud operability; but our on-ground action and offerings too, that show that Microsoft has embraced the new wave with full strength and confidence.

When it comes to Disaster Recovery areas or mission-critical applications, are they going to stay in —off-cloud zone?

I don’t see it as a major factor. You have to look at what applications you are talking about. Technically, mission-critical apps can run very well on ‘Cloud’. Applications per-se can run. Now should you have a data centre within your purview region or not is your call. Depending on that, it can lead to some latency problem.

In his book ‘Rewiring the World: The Big Switch’ Nicholas Carr alludes how the ‘Cloud’ phenomenon can put internal IT departments out of business. How strong is that contention in your view?

With any kind of new offering in the market, be it hardware or technology, a change happens. Yes, right-shifting would happen, but downshifting is not the word. Would the entire IT department go out of work with the advent of ‘Cloud’? No. May be the server-manpower ratio would change.

According to Forrester’s 2009 Cloud Computing report, 44 per cent enterprises are slated to be interested in building their own internal clouds. Who will win the bigger slice of the pie — Private Clouds, Public Clouds or Hybrid Clouds? Your take on this continuum?

There are certain arguments which say — look at Private Clouds, let’s say for HR or sensitive information areas. Some would argue in favor of Public Clouds. The discussion is slowly going towards dedicated clouds and hybrid clouds, in my opinion.

How soon can we see concepts like ‘specialised clouds’ or ‘vertical clouds’ into action?

If that happens, the whole debate of the earlier question would go away. That is because hardware cost would be equal between external and internal entities. So the difference would only pan out on applications. This paradigm of economies of scale that MS can provide would be good enough with elasticity, scalability and other remarkable attributes to go along.

Another flak that ‘Cloud’ gets is that it’s actually not a new wrinkle. It’s old wine in a new bottle, and being pitched as new, while it’s not even simple to start with. What’s your take?

It depends on which segment you are talking about — the customer angle or something else. Microsoft has been providing Hotmail for the last fifteen years. Google would fit in the same example. Today, partners etc are witnessing that it’s all about convergence. Suddenly telecom costs have changed the entire angle. So, the argument changes with segment shifts and technology-shifts. I wouldn’t say it’s old wine in a new bottle. Because, suddenly there so many new capabilities around ‘cloud’. I guess we will see greater adoption across the entire ecosystem.

We saw ‘Cloud’ getting another left-handed compliment when Greenpeace recently highlighted with a strong report that “If considered as a country, global telecommunications and data centers behind cloud computing would have ranked fifth in the world for energy use in 2007, behind the United States, China, Russia and Japan” and how the “cloud' of data that is becoming the heart of the Internet is creating an all-too-real cloud of pollution as Facebook, Apple and others build data centers powered by coal”. Would you nod along?

If you look at any data centre, the biggest cost is certainly power which is the single most consumption factor from an opex point-of-view. Large vendors, in an agnostic way, have put up world-class technology here which are contributing a lot on green advantages.