Basically every small and medium business in your city has Windows Server running in a closet or on a shelf somewhere doing Exchange, AD, files, and maybe SQL Server for a shrink wrapped line of business app. Every one of them is a candidate for Azure and you can bet their VAR / MSP is pushing it.
Microsoft is trying to position Azure into the world currently dominated by contractors visiting the Windows Server closets of Main Street businesses. This is how that world works.
Outside bay area and startups world, windows servers are gold standard. Particularly, large enterprises. They have created nice lock-ins too. Majority of large enterprises (not just in US but around world) have Windows stack meaning majority of tech team consists of .net folks with all the .net tools like visual studio, MSDN licenses etc. And with Azure, you add cloud computing too. So it's likely that all these big enterprises are going to use Azure with their fat checquebooks.
P.S. I haven't used Azure platform yet so I can't comment on product quality of Azure
I would expect this, and I would expect this trend to continue for several years. Almost every Windows server running in a corporate machine room or departmental closet should be an instance in the Azure Cloud.
Microsoft will be delivering extra value by providing the hardware and taking responsibility for running these systems, and will generate recurring revenue for as long as the customer needs what's on those servers. This is a gold mine Microsoft can dig for many years.
It's clearly a puff piece. Having said that, there are a lot of MS server customers and I can imagine Azure being a compelling option if you don't want to do a rewrite.
Agree that Azure AD is the magic key to get more businesses to adopt MS cloud solutions. I'm also seeing a lot of large businesses covering their bases by using Azure for Corp IT and dev/test environments, but set up production with AWS instances. Of course, this is only when they're used in a Infrastructure-as-a-Service setup, not if their apps consume platform-specific services. In addition, services like SCCM Cloud Gateway (for managing and patching remote users) only work through Azure.
No doubt MS will continue to grow in this space, since it offers stability, support when things go south, as well as easy onboarding with various developer focused initiatives. While the variety of services doesn't match the AWS catalogue yet, they also offer a marketplace where 3rd party services can be purchased and integrated.
Actually it is... it's not too different from what it always was. In the past, it was about businesses running "Back Office" versions of servers in the office. Because NAS boxes are now a good enough option in small businesses, and many are moving their hosting into more prominent cloud services, they are positioning Azure to be the platform of choice for windows based services and applications. They've got Office365 to handle the mail server duties people lost moving away from back office. As a small business you no longer need to self-host anything (other than maybe a local NAS box).
I hate sounding like an advertisement for MS, but it really isn't THAT much of a pivot. More adapting to keep those parts of income that used to come from server licenses now as services. Not even mentioning Azure as a target, which is probably the best bet for keeping legacy apps running while transitioning/refactor/rewrite to new generations.
I don't deny that Microsoft is using Windows Server for internet-scale workloads. My contention is they are trying to capture the business of small software vendors, who previously built shrink-wrap products for Windows Server and are now reaching for something like AWS to host their SaaS. This type of business favors Linux, so Azure has to be a good place to run Linux.
It's unsurprising to me that *nix systems are the majority on Azure. It is surprising to me that enterprise shops still commission new Windows servers at all in $current_year.
The enterprise agreements don't help that much. Azure is banking on the fact that traditional Windows shops will pay tons to run MS's cloud. Hadoop... On Microsoft, and so on. Plus they have unique AD positioning.
I think there is a massive market for 100% cloud-compatible local deployments. In my personal experience every .Net shop I've seen would love to be incorporating more Azure goodness locally, but can't as they're cloud specific techs which bump into the realities of deployment and maintenance.
Personally, I think MS crapped the bed a little by taking Azure Stack off of commodity hardware and onto a combined hardware/software solution. Being able to deploy Azure-compatible solutions piece-meal locally would be a massive boon to governments, healthcare operations, and anyone working on a more thorough migration to the cloud.
Most of the EU, for example, has privacy regulation that makes cloud hosting impossible in some situations. Having a 'local Azure' would make it highly reasonable have all apps architected around Azures components and technology. Without the local deployment though you're kinda stuck with each foot in a different canoe... Hybrid infrastructures are highly favorable to DevOps and multi-party development scenarios.
So, just to understand, are you writing the software because the large business clients are already tied to azure and gonna keep using it? Trying to understand why there is a market, and why people would want to use it.
I don't think Azure needs a big client like this. I'm pretty sure Azure is just printing money for Microsoft now as it is. IIUC, newer AD deployments with Microsoft VM infrastructure automatically hybridize between local systems and Azure cloud, so there's basically a 1-click solution to deploying at Azure with a VPN instead of to local hardware you need to maintain and expand as needed, if there's even any local hardware at all and it's not AD deployed entirely in the cloud. I would say it's like if Amazon owned VMware, but that doesn't even quite encompass it, because many companies already have and need Active Directory environments so are already bought into the Microsoft ecosystem, and I'm not sure there's a combination of companies that actually compares to that. The closest might be Red Hat (maybe + VMware, but RH has virt offerings) + AWS, but that doesn't quite match either. Our company makes extensive use of CentOS but we also have a lot of Microsoft AD infrastructure we pay for.
Keep in mind that that is consumer Windows. Active Directory and Exchange run on Windows Server and I'm sure every large business has a fleet of those (or has decided to ditch them in favour of Azure).
I wonder what falls in the "other" bucket. Visual Studio / MSDN come to mind. Perhaps Enterprise Services is split out from Azure & Windows Server. It looks like Dynamics might be reported separately from Office although I'd normally expect it to be grouped with it instead.
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