CIO Article: Why Microsoft will beat Google in the enterprise cloud war

According to this article on CIO.com,  Microsoft will beat Google in the enterprise cloud space because Office 365 is better accepted by large enterprise customers, while customers in the small business space are still happy with Google Docs for Business.  

It makes sense.  Microsoft had such a dominant presence with their desktop office applications with large businesses for decades.  As soon as they introduced the multi device and collaboration capabilities provided with the cloud, those customers found it easier to stick with what they had been using in the past.   Google is still strong with the small business market who switched to them earlier.  They were most likely trying to avoid Microsoft price premiums in the first place which is why they adopted the free Google Docs service.   Enterprise customers were already accustomed to paying the Microsoft fees.  Trust and security issues prevented them from  allowing their users to switch to the new services Google was offering.   Now that Microsoft has the competitive Office 365 platform, there is no longer reason for them to consider switching.

The question is, will Google be able to introduce enough unique features to win over loyal Microsoft customers?  I can't wait to see their next move.

Fortune Article: Google's Secret Plan to Catch Up to Amazon and Microsoft in Cloud

Fortune Magazine recently published an article explaining Google's plan to compete with Amazon and others in the cloud.  They say they've got their work cut out for them since last year Gartner estimates showed that Amazon Web Services is running with 10 times the capacity of it's next 14 cloud competitors combined.

They showcase how Google is building an infrastructure comparable to Akamai and is partnering with the Content Delivery Network leader to enhance both company's capabilities.  They also have put former VMWare CEO in charge of their cloud unit which should help them be more competitive.

But Google has struggled to cloud services to business users mainly because they haven't had the history of selling through a channel to these kinds of accounts in the same way that Microsoft or IBM has had and without those relationships, it's an uphill battle to win the their trust.  They've had to play the price game to attract new customers and that's never a winning strategy when dealing with competitors with a larger footprint or better relationship with clients.

Obviously, Google has a tremendous amount of technical know how and a very lucrative cash flow from their search and advertising businesses to fund a tremendous amount of R&D and make strategic investments to help them catch up with Amazon and Microsoft. so this battle is just beginning.

Popular Article On The Cloud Wars for January 18, 2015

The commodity battle is only one front in the cloud wars

Gigaom

... to create much higher-margin goods, and all three cloud providers offer a range of additional services built on top of the commodity infrastructure.

Flag as irrelevant

Popular Articles on The Cloud Wars for January 17, 2015

AWS Launches Supercharged C4 Cloud Instances | Data Center Knowledge
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/01/12/aws-launches-supercharged-c4-cloud-instances/


Clouds often have an advantage over competitors with specific use cases. Cloud Spectator attempts a cost comparison keeping the use case in mind.
Which IaaS Provider is Cheapest? Which One Has More Configurations, Locations?
// Data Center Knowledge

Microsoft Azure Announces New G Series Instances

On Friday, Microsoft announces the general availability of incredible new capabilities in Azure.  The new G Series Virtual Machines will be the most powerful VMs yet featuring up to 32 vCPUs with the latest XEON e5 v3 processors, up to 448GB of memory. and an amazing 6.59 TB of local SSD storage.

All this memory will enable much faster deployments of mission critical apps including relational database servers like SQL and MySQL as well as large NoSQL and BigData solutions like MongoDB, Cassandra, Cloudera, xTremeData, and DataStax.  

Microsoft Azure continues to put pressure on the rest of IAAS suppliers.

Your move, Amazon.

Announcement Details:
http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/01/08/azure-is-now-bigger-faster-more-open-and-more-secure/

Microsoft Will Win The Cloud Wars?

According to the Motley Fool, Microsoft will win the Cloud Wars.

Their premise is as follows:

Because Microsoft's figured out the real opportunity to generate cloud revenues isn't hosting, that's already a commoditized business. Delivering its suite of software products via the cloud, and continuing to add solutions and delivery channels via strategic partnerships is where Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is focusing his efforts, just as he should.

It's a good point.  Amazon and Google have been so quick to slash prices, you wonder how much they truly think their customers value their service.  You can make the argument that Microsoft is a dinosaur and all the momentum has been with Google and Amazon, but Microsoft has played this game for a lot longer than either one of these companies.

Office 365 is a winner.  Microsoft still owns the enterprise back-end infrastructure and a huge percentage of the end point clients.  If they can continue to provide value to their clients as well as security, manageability, and productivity, their clients will remain loyal.  And these clients are used to paying big bucks for their licensing fees.  They're not going to be quick to completely jump to away from them and if anything, they'll probably start to swing back towards them if Windows 10 is more Windows 7 than Windows Vista.

I wouldn't bet against Microsoft.