I recently attended Microsoft's New York City stop on their Cloud Roadshow. Here are my notes. Full disclosure: I work at Avepoint, a Microsoft ISV and Partner of the Year for 2015.
Microsoft is pushing hard for the cloud, competing well with incumbent players. Whereas a year or two ago they were prompting Office 365 as their cloud solution, now everything is about Azure. Don't just move your email and collaboration to the cloud, move your entire infrastructure.
Toward this end Microsoft has made several enhancements to Azure, their cloud infrastructure service. Previously, Azure supported Windows servers and services, and a handful of Linux systems. Now, Microsoft is certified to host Red Hat Linux implementations, meaning Red Hat won't hang up on you when you tell them your box is in Azure. Microsoft also supports Unix/Linux automation with Powershell DSC, though you can also continue with Puppet and Chef if that's your thing.
Microsoft is still pitching their 365 services; there was quite a bit on migrating to 365, in particular ensuring that Sharepoint customizations can make it to Sharepoint Online. Broadly, the story is hybrid support: customers who are ready to go to the cloud but have one or two things that don't fit well. Microsoft's story in 2015 seems to be: move what you can, and connect it with what you can't.
For example, say your company's sales team needs to send out mass emails to employees - thousands at a time. There are limitations on how many emails and how many recipients Exchange Online can send, in order to prevent Microsoft from being flagged as a spam factory. So, you might want to keep an on-premise Exchange server for just that purpose - but otherwise move your company email to the cloud.
Or, for another example, say you want to move to the cloud to lower infrastructure costs, but there are certain teams or categories of data that really shouldn't go to the cloud. Keep your Sharepoint on file server infrastructure on-premise for that data, while moving the non-sensitive materials to the cloud.
On a recent drive across Brooklyn, as we arced high on the BQE, I saw several old factory buildings in Red Hook that had been renovated and turned into spaces for small businesses, including startups. If instead of renovating an old building, new ones were being built, you'd have what Microsoft is doing: building big boxes (data centers) for businesses to move into. Never mind the electrical and the plumbing, or the security for who has access - just tell us how much space you need and we'll set it up for you. They're not telling you you can only use Microsoft furniture (err, operating systems and browsers) or phones. They just want you to use their infrastructure.
Admittedly, it is not quite as open-ended as Amazon's offerings. I'm reasonably sure that if you said you wanted to spin up a bunch of Silk VMs to act as scalable Kindle emulators, Amazon would pause and say, "yeah sure." But Microsoft is catching up, and arguably the more secure for it.
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Monday, March 16, 2015
Irony
For most of my technical career, I've supported Apple products. When I was in college, after a couple of years in one lab supporting PCs and VAX terminals, I moved to another that was mostly Macintosh, and from there went on to a good run as an Apple tech: to a local Apple reseller, an on-site tech at a media company, to a field tech for an Apple-Authorized Service Provider, and eventually back to the education space before re-entering the corporate world as: Macintosh Support Engineer. For about twenty years, Apple products were my speciality, my area of expertise, that thing about me that made me alternately cool and god-like to some, weird and unlettered to others.
Early on it was just what I found myself using every day. If you're in college, and you work in a lab full of Macs, you learn to use them, and you understand how they were. I was always more or less bi-lingual: I could translate what I did on a Mac to what I was doing on a PC, back in those primitive days when Windows was, at best, little more than DOS in drag. I was never an ardent fangirl thinking Apple was superior. I knew I didn't know enough to make an argument. I knew what I knew, and it took me pretty far.
I remember the bad days for Apple. The 1990s, prior to Steve Jobs' triumphal return, were terrible for the company, even as they continued to innovate. They did not have the salesmanship they have now. They started the decade with product bloat, trying to be like the crowded PC marketplace with big breadbox-style machines, as well as their expensive all-in-one units. The PowerPC was a great leap forward in performance, but eventually ran its course as Apple's partnership with IBM ended and Intel caught up the performance race.
Even after Jobs' return, it took a while for Apple to regain its footing. Microsoft took an investment stake in Apple, offering some product support, a financial lifeline, all in return for helping shed its monopolist image. OS X took a couple of versions to really take off too: the 10.0 release was not ready for consumers, and it wasn't till 10.2 that it was really usable. Since, then, a steady progression of improvements and feature-adds have made OS X into a really good operating system. Sales of Apple's other product line (*cough* iphone *cough*) have helped as well.
In all of that time, in the techie world - a world where you essentially are the products that you support - I was seen by corporate IT people as this weird specialist who could keep the one or two (or that, times a hundred) machines running, which were just a small fraction of the total population. To Mac users, I was this amazing smart person who could make things work. To fellow Macintosh techs, I was someone who learned and contributed to the composite body of knowledge? New update broke something? Shared. Here is the fix: do it differently.
As a user of computers I was always that minority - the weird Mac user, using second-rate copies of Windows, various browsers, finding ways to dance backwards in heels, but with amazing video and photo applications. "Macs are for Graphics", people would say. People still say that, though it isn't strictly speaking true. Most of the Mac users I know now are software developers. They like Macs because they are based on Unix.
Now, working in the corporate world, here I am now responsible for a much broader range of technologies, Windows as well as Macintosh, and the various tools to support them. Additionally, Apple's minority status in the computer world is completely reversed in the mobile world. Globally, Android is dominant, but very location-specific and fragmented across manufacturers. Apple dominates as a manufacturer and in providing a uniform user experience.
The strengths of the fragmented PC-based market in the 1990s are weaknesses today. The only spitballing I'll throw in here is that modern global supply chains did not drive the razor-thin margins on OEMs then that they do now. The point is, Apple is to the current mobile space wha Microsoft was to the personal computing space a generation ago: a giant cash machine defining how the market should work.
So, along comes Microsoft, with their Windows 8 and their Surface devices and their Office 365, and what happens? The cool Apple people, long underdogs, laugh and ignore them - even though Microsoft arguably provides a better experience for some of their products on the iPad than they do on their own operating system.
If ten years ago I was figuring out how to make Apple products work with printers and servers geared towards Windows, now I'm struggling to make sure our remote access and wireless solutions work with iOS. I have to get our email system to work with iPads and iPhones. These are problems we have solved where I work, but the point is, we're forcing infrastructure to work with the device, rather than the other way around. It's like designing a car around the steering wheel.
That, my friends, is irony. Take it from one of the ironic generation. It isn't as cool as it sounds.
Early on it was just what I found myself using every day. If you're in college, and you work in a lab full of Macs, you learn to use them, and you understand how they were. I was always more or less bi-lingual: I could translate what I did on a Mac to what I was doing on a PC, back in those primitive days when Windows was, at best, little more than DOS in drag. I was never an ardent fangirl thinking Apple was superior. I knew I didn't know enough to make an argument. I knew what I knew, and it took me pretty far.
I remember the bad days for Apple. The 1990s, prior to Steve Jobs' triumphal return, were terrible for the company, even as they continued to innovate. They did not have the salesmanship they have now. They started the decade with product bloat, trying to be like the crowded PC marketplace with big breadbox-style machines, as well as their expensive all-in-one units. The PowerPC was a great leap forward in performance, but eventually ran its course as Apple's partnership with IBM ended and Intel caught up the performance race.
Even after Jobs' return, it took a while for Apple to regain its footing. Microsoft took an investment stake in Apple, offering some product support, a financial lifeline, all in return for helping shed its monopolist image. OS X took a couple of versions to really take off too: the 10.0 release was not ready for consumers, and it wasn't till 10.2 that it was really usable. Since, then, a steady progression of improvements and feature-adds have made OS X into a really good operating system. Sales of Apple's other product line (*cough* iphone *cough*) have helped as well.
In all of that time, in the techie world - a world where you essentially are the products that you support - I was seen by corporate IT people as this weird specialist who could keep the one or two (or that, times a hundred) machines running, which were just a small fraction of the total population. To Mac users, I was this amazing smart person who could make things work. To fellow Macintosh techs, I was someone who learned and contributed to the composite body of knowledge? New update broke something? Shared. Here is the fix: do it differently.
As a user of computers I was always that minority - the weird Mac user, using second-rate copies of Windows, various browsers, finding ways to dance backwards in heels, but with amazing video and photo applications. "Macs are for Graphics", people would say. People still say that, though it isn't strictly speaking true. Most of the Mac users I know now are software developers. They like Macs because they are based on Unix.
Now, working in the corporate world, here I am now responsible for a much broader range of technologies, Windows as well as Macintosh, and the various tools to support them. Additionally, Apple's minority status in the computer world is completely reversed in the mobile world. Globally, Android is dominant, but very location-specific and fragmented across manufacturers. Apple dominates as a manufacturer and in providing a uniform user experience.
The strengths of the fragmented PC-based market in the 1990s are weaknesses today. The only spitballing I'll throw in here is that modern global supply chains did not drive the razor-thin margins on OEMs then that they do now. The point is, Apple is to the current mobile space wha Microsoft was to the personal computing space a generation ago: a giant cash machine defining how the market should work.
So, along comes Microsoft, with their Windows 8 and their Surface devices and their Office 365, and what happens? The cool Apple people, long underdogs, laugh and ignore them - even though Microsoft arguably provides a better experience for some of their products on the iPad than they do on their own operating system.
If ten years ago I was figuring out how to make Apple products work with printers and servers geared towards Windows, now I'm struggling to make sure our remote access and wireless solutions work with iOS. I have to get our email system to work with iPads and iPhones. These are problems we have solved where I work, but the point is, we're forcing infrastructure to work with the device, rather than the other way around. It's like designing a car around the steering wheel.
That, my friends, is irony. Take it from one of the ironic generation. It isn't as cool as it sounds.
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