Posted by Ursheet Parikh on Tue, Jul 05, 2011 @ 02:55 PM
The cloud is for Microsoft what the services business became for IBM. It will be the engine of growth for Microsoft for the next 20 years. It takes Microsoft’s core competency that enables enterprises to manage their information to drive productivity and takes that business from being a product sale to a turnkey solution sale. Microsoft has tremendous assets for this battle - deep customer relationships, a massive install base and a hungry, efficient channel. It is focused on making the transition and is investing to build the most comprehensive cloud services offering. It just needs time to make this transition happen. Here is how Microsoft can buy that time:
- Get the data NOW - The center of gravity is moving to the mass of data. Once you get live enterprise data, apps and compute will follow
- Setting the sales and reseller channel incentives on deployed design wins - all cloud wins start small. By the time it is a million dollar deal, it is too hard to switch.At scale, the Cloud model moves closer to Microsoft’s core business model.
