Ray Ozzie announces the future of Microsoft Services and Software

During the first keynote today that was given by Ray Ozzie, Chief Architect at Microsoft, the now future for Microsoft was announced. A new operating system intended for the Cloud was presented. The new name, which had been held secret until the keynote was also revealed:

Windows Azure

As I mentioned, this will be an operating system intended for the Cloud where corporations can host custom developed Services that are backed by massive distributed data centers. On this platform a number of different services will be available, such as:

• .NET Services
• ASP.NET Services
• SQL Services (reporting, analysis)
• Live Services
• SharePoint Services
• Dynamics CRM Services

and probably more to come. This will all be backed by a distributed Cloud data storage that any of these services, including self developed services, can access.

This is fundamentaly a hosting service that Microsoft offers, but it is also a lot more. It will simplify deploying, monitoring and maintining software services for companies. It is not just an hosting alternative offered by Microsoft but instead something that could potentially change how corporations develop their solutions.

The biggest questions at this point is how this will be met by the market. I am sure that many companies will have concerns on how safe and secure their data or code is when it is "in the Cloud" and how do we build future solutions that leverage the Cloud and Azure while still being able to connect to existing back-end systems and legacy systems without having to compromise the integrity of the internal networks and architecture. Hopefully some of the future sessions here will reveal more on how this is intended to work.