Bob Kelly, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Infrastructure Server Marketing
But is the investment required for companies to replace their existing systems with new ones going to be less than the marginal cost of maintaining those existing systems until the economic environment improves?
It depends on the customer. A great advantage of Windows Server 2008 is our virtualization technology. It used to cost you $3,000 to buy the Enterprise Edition license and then you had to pay another $3,000 for each virtual server running on top of that, up to four. Now, because of the licensing rights change we allow you to run four virtual machines on top of that for no additional cost. Now, for $3,000, you can run five machines, the base plus four virtual machines.
If you're a Windows customer, for a very marginal outlay of price you can consolidate your physical environment into a virtual environment, which reduces your total footprint of servers. You get a huge power savings and your management costs go down.
Oracle and Amazon announced a deal that makes Oracle 11g and other products available as part of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud service. Is Microsoft headed down the same path?
We're telling everybody to hold their horses, wait until the PDC. At the Professional Developers Conference in late October we will be more concrete about what our plans are, what our offers are in the cloud. But you could probably guess to a large degree. We are a platform company and we are going to offer platform elements in the cloud.
From a developer's standpoint, it will be coherent across the on-premises experience and the cloud-based experience, so you can leverage the learning you already have. If you're a customer, it's a consumption model. I want to consume an application, but do I want to consume it on the premises or in the cloud? We'll make it coherent.
Without giving away a whole bunch of interesting secrets and all that stuff we're holding for PDC, there is nothing that is frightening to us about the cloud. It's just a different delivery vehicle. There's nothing frightening to us about other vendors getting into the space. We believe in the platform and we believe that because we have a platform that customers have chosen with their feet, and their dollars, in the on-premises world, we will be able to deliver that same value proposition in a cloud-based world.
Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.