Muglia on the cloud, Azure and the economy

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Ina Fried CNET News

Published: 16 Jan 2009 15:13 GMT

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A long time ago, Bob Muglia worked on a Microsoft project designed to offer a variety of services in the cloud. That effort, known as Hailstorm, didn't exactly take off and Muglia's career took a detour.

But both Muglia and Hailstorm are back. On 5 January, Microsoft elevated Muglia to divisional president, a recognition of the success he has enjoyed as head of Microsoft's server-software business.

As for Hailstorm, the name is gone, but many of the concepts are back as part of the Windows Azure platform that Microsoft announced in October. Ina Fried of ZDNet UK's sister site, CNET News.com, had the chance to talk with Muglia about Windows Azure, the cloud in general, as well as the economy.

Is this supposed to be a slow-motion rollout with Azure?
A: The way I sort of describe it is, it'll be phased — there's a whole broad set of services. You'll see some of those services go to production next year; exactly what and when, we're still working through. People are able to begin to develop right now, of course, on it, but it will happen over a period of time.

And the other thing right now is, people are still very much kicking the tyres. We have quite a bit of tyre kicking going on, a lot of people provisioned on the services right now and, so far, things have been going well.

What are the kinds of things that you think people will want to run in Azure?
In terms of the classes of applications, I think you'll see two initial ones, though it's fair to say people may have an interest in running in this environment any application they would want to run on-premises. But the initial ones I think would be your web-style applications, which tend be internet-connected and need geo-distribution.

The other class I think is really interesting is anything that involves working in partnership with others: supply chain sorts of applications, business-to-business, Electronic Data Interchange, those sorts of classes of applications in which you need to connect multiple organisations, and you need to deal with authentication, and you need to deal with network connectivity.

Today it's very complex with virtual private networks and password management, and a whole nasty set of problems to deal with, and Azure has some built-in services to simplify those things, including a service bus to go through firewalls and connect things over the internet — again, any system to allow people to authenticate. Those are basics that are fundamental, that everyone will really need in this kind of environment.

So, I think you'll see those sorts of things emerge initially, but then you could just imagine all sorts of things. You could imagine people using it for (high-performance computing) applications. That's an area we're looking at, and we certainly are having conversations with a number of academic and other organisations.

In terms of the movement toward the Microsoft-hosted versions of its server products, are there some interesting things that you have come across, as you've had to do the work to get ready for that?
There's a ton. I mean, one is, you need to move so that everything works across the internet, which is just the right thing to do, anyway. Another thing you see is the need to have what we call multi-tenancy. So, to get scale on these things, you can't be dedicating even a virtual machine to a company. You need to be able to support many users, many organisations within a single instance of an application, and so that's an attribute.

There's a whole set of really interesting regulatory things that you hit when you go across the world attached to this. Turns out, some of our products, like unified communications, have VoIP capabilities. Well, you go and take that to many countries of the world, and they call those telephone companies. They call you a telco and, all of a sudden, there's a conversation about being regulated like a telco, you know, in some countries around the world. That may or not be pleasant.

There are issues about data and where data can reside and not reside, and so that's why when you spread geographically around the world, there's a wide variety…

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