Gartner Fellows Neil MacDonald and David Mitchell Smith spoke with Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft, “to discuss his vision for cloud computing, and the impact on enterprise computing and the IT industry.” Their conversation has been published as a Gartner RAS Core Research Note (G00172235), and made available for public consumption via a Microsoft reprint.
Published Key Findings:
- “Ozzie’s (and thus, Microsoft’s) vision of cloud computing emphasizes hybrid enterprise/cloud computing, where organizations choose when and where computing takes place locally versus in cloud-based infrastructure, and emphasizes that the on-premises and cloud-based solutions work seamlessly together.
- As with early encryption issues, Ozzie believes that security and privacy issues will be addressed as the industry matures in a combination of legislative advances, as well as industry cooperation.
- Ozzie’s vision for cloud computing includes system infrastructure, an application platform and finished applications being delivered as a service.
- Microsoft is investing in its own data centers because it must in order to provide its consumer-based services. It believes it is helping to lead the industry in providing innovations in data center architectures.
- Ozzie believes the future of cloud computing is in the experience delivered via a browser across multiple devices — mobile, PC and TV-type screens — which is a vision he refers to as "three screens and a cloud." “
The entire report is well-worth the read.
A quick excerpt on Ozzie’s hybrid model vision:
"Ozzie: I believe in a hybrid model. I fundamentally, deeply believe in a hybrid model at the experience side and at the back-end side.
At the back-end side, it depends on the size of enterprise and the workload, as well as the segment of the enterprise and whether it is highly regulated or whatever. The decisions regarding what to keep on-premises versus what to distribute into the cloud will vary dramatically. Very small businesses will put almost everything into the cloud. Very large businesses will put all their infrastructural systems, such as mail, phone systems and document management, into the cloud. Enterprise applications that have high integration requirements and a lot of legacy issues will stay on-premises. What happens in the middle is a mix."
“…But again, it’s a hybrid architecture. If you don’t have the center, then you can’t rendezvous. You can’t find each other. You can’t connect in any way, shape or form. However, if you don’t have the edge, then you don’t have the agility. You pay for ingress and egress when you don’t have to.”
