Why Motivations Matter in The Cloud!

So I just finished my Cloud Services session at this years WWPC in Houston, and while I was impressed as usual with the level of feedback and questions that I received at the end, one really struck a chord with me.

Let me give you some background first. I’ve spent the past month getting up to speed with where we’re at as a company in terms of the cloud. More specifically, as I look out at the market, I’ve asked myself, “Why Cloud Services?”.

We have BizTalk Services and SQL Server Services, and it’s not hard to see where we’re going… we’re taking the stuff we’ve done best on-premise, extracting the services DNA, and making it available in the cloud for developers.

So onto the question today from the audience, “What are we doing to tackle Google and Amazon in the cloud?”.

As I thought through the answer, one thing kept resonating with me, what and more importantly, why are they doing cloud? It hit me that the motivation of the vendor makes a big impact on the type of cloud offering they have, and how they will offer that to their audience. For example, if you want to drive users to your bigger back-end ad revenue system, then it makes sense to offer a free platform that encourages that behavior. Alternatively, for us, if you want to enable your partner ecosystem to be immediately productive and effective in the cloud, using their existing experience, skills and tools, then it makes sense to do what we’re doing.

What it made me realize more importantly is that there won’t be one cloud platform provider, but many who will have cloud platforms that exhibit functional behaviors based on their business motivations.

I think that’s good for all of us! :)