Category Archives: cloud computing

cloud computing, google, professional

Google App Inventor not dead, MIT to offer public service in 2012

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Google’s App Inventor is a visual and mostly browser-hosted development environment for Android. There is a design tool:

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and a "Blocks Editor” which lets you create program logic using visual blocks:

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App Inventor is a great concept but in practice most developers find it easier to use more traditional tools to code their applications. Earlier this year Google said that App Inventor would close, but that the code would be open sourced in partnership with MIT Media Labs. This is a kind of homecoming, since it was Professor Hal Abelson at MIT who proposed it as a project while on sabbatical with Google in 2008.

Google now says, in an email to App Inventor users:

Sometime in the first quarter of 2012, the Center plans to provide an App Inventor service for general public access, similar to the one Google is currently running.

Since App Inventor will continue running at Google until December 2011, this may mean only a short interval during which App Inventor will be unavailable. There will be no migration of projects though, so you have to download any existing projects and later upload them to the new service.

App Inventor is inspired by Scratch, an existing open source MIT project which is used to good effect in education.

cloud computing, internet, professional, salesforce.com, software, software development, Web

Twilio: programmable telephony, SMS comes to the UK, Europe

Web telephony provider twilio, which is based in San Francisco, has today announced its first international office, in London. You can now purchase UK telephone numbers at a cost of $1.00 per month, or Freephone numbers for $2.00 per month.

Twilio is not in competition with Skype or Google Voice; rather it offers an API so that you can incorporate voice calls and SMS messaging into web or mobile applications. The REST API lets you provision numbers with various options for what happens to incoming calls (conferencing, forwarding to another number or voice over IP, recording, transcriptions), as well as notifications so that you can get email or SMS alerts.

CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson came from Amazon Web Services (AWS), and has a similar business model in that twilio targets developers and offers infrastructure as a service, rather than selling complete applications to its customers. Twilio does not own any datacenters, but uses mainly AWS and some RackSpace virtual servers to provide a resilient and scalable service.

The launch partner for the UK is Zendesk, a cloud-based helpdesk provider, which is using twilio to add voice to what was previously an email-based product. Zendesk forms an excellent case study. Using the service, you can provision a support number and have calls redirected to agents, or have a voicemail recorded, using a simple setup procedure. Calls can be recorded and you can have alerts sent when they are received.

What this means is that even the smallest businesses can offer helpdesk support using a pay-as-you-go model.

Lawson observes that twilio is the 6th and 13th most popular API on ProgrammableWeb (he says it is 5th if you combine voice and SMS) and claims very rapid growth in traffic using the API, though he will not talk about revenue. The company has around 60 employees in San Francisco and just one in the UK initially.

The service is also launching in beta for 5 other European countries: Poland, France, Portugal, Austria and Denmark. 11 other countries will be added by the end of 2011, though there are prominent omissions – no Germany or Spain, for example.

I was impressed by the demo and presentation at the press launch. Lawson provisioned a conferencing number and had us dial in during the briefing. He says twilio is engaged in disrupting on-premise telephony applications with a cloud service, in the same way Salesforce.com has done for CRM (Customer Relationship Management). The service is inexpensive to set up; Lawson said that this commodity pay-as-you-go pricing is essential for disruptive technology to succeed, another strategy borrowed from AWS.

There are server libraries for web platforms including Ruby, PHP, Java and C#, and client SDKs for JavaScript, Android and iOS.

adobe, cloud computing, internet, mobile, professional

Adobe Debut: my favourite of the new touch apps, cloud-side rendering

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Adobe announced six touch apps for Android and Apple iPad tablets yesterday at its MAX conference in Los Angeles. These hook into cloud services offered by the Creative Cloud, also just announced.

My favourite among the new apps is Adobe Debut. The problem this addresses: you want to show your client the work you have done in one of the Creative Suite apps like Photoshop or InDesign. A tablet is ideal for handing round at a meeting, but Adobe will not be porting the full Creative Suite to iPad any time soon.

The solution: Debut runs Creative Suite in the cloud and sends down static images to your device. You can even see the separate layers in a Photoshop image.

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It seems to me there is a lot of future in this kind of cloud-side rendering. Provided you have an internet connection, it is an elegant and scalable solution. In Debut, it is rounded off by commenting and mark-up features. The simplicity and focus of the app may make it preferable to running the full Creative Suite app locally, though it is not so good if the client asks you to change some detail RIGHT NOW.

Note: I have not actually used the app except in a brief demo.

apple, cloud computing, iphone, microsoft, mobile, professional, windows

A few observations on Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango”

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I received a Windows Phone running version 7.5 “Mango” for review yesterday. Here are some initial observations; I am not going to call it a review after such as short time.

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There is still no screen capture utility – well, there is this one but it requires a developer accounts. So no screens, sorry. Microsoft should fix this – how difficult can it be?

Microsoft says there over 500 updates in Mango, and it does feel like a significant update, though retaining the look and feel of the first release. A half-version upgrade is about right.

Some things I noticed:

  • Task switching. Press and hold the back button, and swipe through running apps. This is excellent, better than iPhone or Android.
  • Voice control. This is expanded in Mango to include web search, text messaging and more. Tip: to see the commands, hold down the Windows key to go into speech mode, and click the help icon.

    It has great potential, especially with a bluetooth headset for true hands-free. I have a Plantronics Voyager Pro bluetooth headset, reviewed here. Using this guy, I can press and hold the call button on the headset, to put the phone into speech mode.

    I found this works well for calling people or simple searches, but general speech to text is not too good. I tried texting someone the message “Your parcels have arrived”. After several attempts, all of which were interpreted as various strings of garbage starting “George”, I gave up. I would still use it for making calls though; it seems that when the scope is narrowed to people in your contacts list, the interpretation is more reliable.

  • The search button is no longer contextual – it always takes you to Bing search. I think this is a retrograde step.
  • Local Scout is a feature that is meant to find restaurants, shops, things to do, and other handy information based on your location or the current map location. This is a neat idea, but when I tried it for my home town it did not work well. The first problem: I found that tapping the Local Scout tile is unreliable, and sometimes reports that Bing cannot find the location even when the location button in Bing Maps works fine.

    Fortunately you can also use Local Scout from Bing Maps. The Local Scout listing was not good though. Of the top 20 food and drink places, one had been closed for years, others were duplicated under old and new names, and there were hardly any ratings or reviews. Tap “Suggest changes” and you can submit changes to the address details or report closure, but you cannot add a review or rating, which seems a severe omission.

    I downloaded the TripAdvisor app which is a great deal more useful, mainly because of the amount of user-generated content.

    Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me that Microsoft needs to join a few dots here; Local Scout is only as good as its data.

  • Office and SharePoint integration. As soon as I gave Windows Phone my Live ID, it picked up my SkyDrive account and was able to open, edit and save documents there. I also hooked up Outlook to my own Exchange server, and added an Office 365 SharePoint account as well.

    SkyDrive support is new and a huge feature, especially considering that it is a free service. Editing features on the phone are limited, but you can include basic formatting.  More important, you can easily access what could be a large document repository.

    OneNote support is good, and notes made on your phone sync automatically to SkyDrive, where you can further view and edit them in a browser, or in desktop OneNote. I guess I can show a grab of the browser, which shows that the voice memo is inaccessible:

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    I discovered a few oddities. I was unable to link Windows Phone to my own SharePoint 2010 test server, receiving a message “We don’t support this authentication scheme”. Later I found this information:

Unless your organization uses a Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) server, you can only access a SharePoint 2010 site if you’re in the office and connected to your organization’s Wi-Fi network.

That is a considerable limitation. It did work OK with SharePoint on Office 365, except that for some reason I can find no way to create new documents on Office 365 – well, maybe in the browser. The Office Hub can create new documents on SkyDrive, but not on SharePoint, which is odd as the two have a lot in common.

Despite these issues, you get a lot out of the box for using Office on the move, particularly if you use a supported SharePoint configuration or SkyDrive. The on-screen keyboard is good too.

  • Music search. This is a fun feature. Go to Bing search, click the music icon, and it will try to recognize what is playing. It had no problem finding Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream. It struggled a bit with the more obscure Strangely Strange but Oddly Normal by Dr. Strangely Strange; but on the second attempt it found that too.
  • The social media features seem strong to me, though you are limited to the baked-in services which are Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Windows Live (no Google+). You do have to link each service to your Live ID for full features; for example, you give permission to Windows Live to post to your Twitter account. The integration is smooth and if you spend your time juggling with these four services then this may well the phone for you. For example, you can post a message to all of them at once. I found the People hub good enough as a Twitter client.
  • Apps are still lacking. The issue is not the quantity of apps available, but their quality, and the lack of certain key apps. There is no official Dropbox app, for example, so you will need to use the web or a third-party workaround. On the positive side, the free Guardian app is great, especially since you can pin a section to the Start screen – I did this for Technology – and there are apps for WordPress, Amazon Kindle, the ubiquitous Angry Birds and some other essentials.

    I noticed that TripAdvisor has 61 ratings on the Windows Phone Marketplace, whereas the Android version has 39,930. That illustrates the scale problem Microsoft is facing.

  • Still no Adobe Flash.
  • Microsoft’s new Windows Phone site is clean and informative. Not always the case with Microsoft’s sites. The My Windows Phone site lets you find your, lock or erase your phone, once configured.
  • Internet sharing, which makes your phone into a wireless hotspot, is coming but subject to operator support and approval. This means you will likely pay extra for “tethering”. I have a free app which does this on my Android phone and find it useful, though whether it is worth paying extra every month is another matter.
  • Microsoft has introduced some features aimed at enterprises. In particular, Information Rights Management is now supported for Outlook and Office mobile documents. Another important feature is the ability to deploy custom applications as hidden apps, which do not appear in Marketplace searches, but can be downloaded from a link circulated internally. There is now a Lync (business messaging and conferencing) client for both Office 365 and on-premise Lync servers.

Future of Windows Phone?

My guess is that Microsoft is badly disappointed by the sales performance of Windows Phone to date. The problem is not so much the phone itself, but that it has failed to convince either the operators, or the retailers, or the general public, that it is something special and worth choosing ahead of either an Apple iPhone or Google Android device. In fact, typically retailers have few if any Windows Phones on display, and even customers asking specifically for one may be redirected to something else. The truth is, there is a disadvantage in having a minority-choice device, most obviously in the selection of apps available, but also in features that rely on user-generated content.

I asked about this problem at the Mango press launch and was told that the Nokia partnership will be the solution.

My review device is a first-generation HTC Trophy, and while it is decent enough it is not outstanding. Give Windows Phone some truly desirable hardware and a few must-have apps, and its fortunes will change, but that is not an outcome that I take for granted.

I do like the SkyDrive and Office 365 integration though, with the caveats noted above, and if I were Microsoft I would be pushing the value of those features.

azure, cloud computing, microsoft, professional

Which Microsoft cloud? Windows Server 8 shows Azure is not everything

I was fortunate to attend a two-day drilldown into what is coming in Windows Server 8 last week, just before the BUILD conference under way in Anaheim, California. It is an impressive release, with two things standing out for me.

One is that Microsoft has successfully re-engineered Windows Server so that it is both sufficiently modular that you can transition from Server Core to full Server and back without reinstall, and also sufficiently detached from the Windows GUI that everything runs and can be configured without the need to log on to the Windows desktop on the server itself. This is a huge achievement.

Second, much of the engineering in Server 8 is focussed on making it better for cloud hosting. This the focus of changes in both Hyper-V and IIS, isolation of virtual networks, proper bandwidth and CPU quotas and throttling, and the ability to move VMs freely between hosts without taking them offline, and to replicate them for failover purposes. You can read more in my piece on The Register.

The question this raises for me is about Windows Server clouds and Azure. Of course Azure runs on Windows Server, but Azure is a platform, all the VMs are stateless, and when you use Azure you are buying into a whole set of services that might or might not match your needs. At a developer event yesterday, one explained how he could not use Azure because he needed to install a third-party application. The Hyper-V role helps a little, but it is not ideal as you still need to solve the stateless problem; at any time, changes you make to the server may be reverted.

If you simply rent plain Windows Server VMs in the cloud, you lose some of the benefits of cloud computing since you are responsible for everything about how the server is configured and maintained; but you also get complete freedom to set it up as you want.

One of the issues with moving from running your own Exchange and SharePoint, for example, to a cloud-hosted service like Office 365 is that you lose control of your destiny. If the service goes down, you have to beg and plead with support to get information and to speed recovery.

Now consider a scenario in which you have your Exchange and SharePoint on hosted Hyper-V VMs with replication (now coming in Server 8) to an alternate provider such as Amazon Web Services, or to your own on-premise servers. If the service goes down, you failover to the replicas.

Another compelling idea relates to live migration. Imagine you have a VM running on premise, and want to move it to the cloud. Without interruption of service, you could in principle migrate it from on-premise to the cloud and back at will. You need a fast connection of course, but this aspect is constantly improving.

The bottom line: plain Windows Server on a VM has many attractions versus an entire platform like Azure.

The snag is, Microsoft does not offer this type of hosting at the moment. Well, that is not necessarily a snag depending on what you think about hosting with Microsoft; but for some there is considerable reassurance in hosting with a company of Microsoft’s size, and which should in theory have the best understanding of what it takes to host Windows Server.

My guess is that Microsoft will either add this capability to Azure – without the limitations of the Hyper-V role, but with replication and failover – or else develop a new cloud service alongside Azure for this purpose.

My further guess is that it would be popular, possibly more so than Azure is today.

amazon, apple, cloud computing, mobile, multimedia, software development

Amazon entices Android developers with $50 incentive

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Amazon is offering Android developers $50 of AWS (Amazon Web Services) credit if they submit an app to the Amazon Android app store.

Although the announcement refers to apps that actually make use of AWS, this does not seem to be a pre-condition:

September 7 – November 15: Android developers who submit an app that is approved to the Amazon Appstore for Android through October 15 will receive a $50 promotional code towards the use of AWS products and services

The move ties in with reports of Amazon developing its own Android-based tablet/Kindle. Exactly what Amazon will offer is still under wraps.

Amazon is an interesting contender in the mobile wars because it has its own instant ecosystem – millions of customers who are already signed up with accounts and stored credit card details. Add in Kindle eBooks, the MP3 store, and the Amazon Instant Video Store for streaming video, and it amounts to a comprehensive content offering that approaches that of Apple.

The AWS element is also significant, and in this respect Amazon is ahead of Apple. Of course there is nothing to stop you using AWS with apps for iOS or other platforms, though there is synergy when it comes to payments.

The relationship with Google is interesting, in that Google controls Android but Amazon is not hooking into Google services or the official Android Marketplace. Amazon is showing no sign of developing its own search engine though, so Google will still get some benefit if Amazon devices are popular, provided Google remains the default for search.

cloud computing, google, professional, software development

Google gets serious about App Engine, ups prices

Google App Engine will be leaving preview status and becoming more expensive in the second half of September, according to an email sent to App Engine administrators:

We are updating our policies, pricing and support model to reflect its status as a fully supported Google product … almost all applications will be billed more under the new pricing.

Along with the new prices there are improvements in the support and SLA (Service Level Agreement) for paid applications. For example, Google’s High Replication Datastore will have a new 99.95% uptime SLA (Service Level Agreement).

Premier Accounts offer companies “as many applications as they need” for $500 per month plus usage fees. Otherwise it is $9.00 per app.

Free apps are now limited to a single instance and 1GB outgoing and incoming bandwidth per day, 50,000 datastore operations, and various other restrictions. The “Instance” pricing is a new model since previously paid apps were billed on the basis of CPU time per hour. Google says in the FAQ that this change removes a barrier to scaling:

Under the current model, apps that have high latency (or in other words, apps that stay resident for long periods of time without doing anything) can’t scale because doing so is cost-prohibitive to Google. This change allows developers to run any sort of application they like but pay for all of the resources that your applications use.

Having said that, the free quota remains generous and sufficient to run a useful application without charge. Google says:

We expect the majority of current active apps will still fall under the free quotas.

Free apps are limited to a single instance, 1GB outgoing and 1GB incoming bandwidth per day, and 50,000 datastore operations, among other restrictions.

The pricing is complex, and comparing prices between cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce.com is even more complex as each one has its own way of charging. My guess is that Google will aim to be at least competitive with AWS (Amazon Web Services), while Microsoft Azure and Salesforce.com seem to be more expensive in most cases.

cloud computing, java, salesforce.com

Heroku gets Java, Salesforce.com embraces HTML5 for mobile

Salesforce.com has made a host of announcements at its Dreamforce conference currently under way in San Francisco. In brief:

  • Chatter, the Salesforce.com social networking platform for enterprises, is being extended with presence status, screen sharing, approval actions, and the ability to create groups with customers as well as with internal users. Salesforce.com calls this the Social Enterprise.
  • Heroku, a service for hosting Ruby applications which Salesforce.com acquired in 2010, will now also support Java.
  • Salesforce.com is baking mobile support into its applications via HTML 5. The new mobile, touch-friendly user interface is called Touch.salesforce.com.

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Other announcements include the general availability of database.com, a cloud database service announced at last year’s Dreamforce, and a new service called Data.com which provides company information though a combination of Dun and Bradstreet’s data along with information from Jigsaw.

I spoke to EMEA VP Tim Barker about the announcements. Does Java on Heroku replace the VMForce platform, which lets you run Java applications on VMWare using the Spring framework plus access to Salesforce.com APIs? Barker is diplomatic and says it is a developer choice, but adds that VMForce “was an inspiration for us, to see that we needed Java language on Heroku as well.”

My observation is that since the introduction of VMForce, VMWare has come up with other cloud-based initiatives, and the Salesforce.com no longer seems to be a key platform. These two companies have grown apart.

For more information on Java on Heroku, see the official announcement. Heroku was formed in part to promote hosted Ruby as an alternative to Java, so this is a bittersweet moment for the platform, and the announcement has an entertaining analysis of Java’s strengths and weaknesses, including the topic “How J2EE detailed Java”:

J2EE was built for a world of application distribution — that is, software packaged to be run by others, such as licensed software. But it was put to use in a world of application development and deployment — that is, software-as-a-service. This created a perpetual impedance mismatch between technology and use case. Java applications in the modern era suffer greatly under the burden of this mismatch.

Naturally the announcement goes on to explain how Heroku has solved this mismatch. Note that Heroku also supports Clojure and Node.js.

What about Database.com, why is it more expensive than other cloud database services? “It is a trusted platform that we operate, and not a race to the bottom in terms of the cheapest possible way to build an application,” says Barker.

That said, note that you can get a free account, which includes 100,000 records, 50,000 transactions per month and support for three enterprise users.

What are the implications of the HTML5-based Touch.salesforce.com for existing Salesforce.com mobile apps, or the Flex SDK and Adobe AIR support in the platform? “We do have an existing set of apps,” says Barker. “We have Salesforce mobile which supports Blackberry, iOS and Android. We also have an application for Chatter. Native apps are an important part of our strategy. But what we’ve found is that for customer apps and for broad applications, to be able to deliver all the functionality, we’re finding the best approach is using HTML 5.”

The advantage of the HTML5 approach for customers is that it comes for free with the platform.

As for Adobe AIR, it is still being used and is a good choice if you need a desktop application. That said, I got the impression that Salesforce.com sees HTML5 as the best solution to the problem of supporting a range of mobile operating systems.

I have been following Salesforce.com closely for several years, during which time the platform has grown steadily and shown impressive consistency. “We grew 38% year on year in Q2,” says Barker. This year’s Dreamforce apparently has nearly 45,000 registered attendees, which is 50% up on last year, though I suspect this may include free registrations for the keynotes and exhibition. Nevertheless, the company claims “the world’s largest enterprise software conference”. Oracle OpenWorld 2010 reported around 41,000 attendees.

cloud computing, microsoft, virtualization

Perfect virtualization is a threat to Windows: VMWare aims to embrace and extinguish

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One advantage Microsoft Windows has in the cloud and tablet wars is that it it is, well, Windows. Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud computing product largely depends on the assumption that users want to run Office on their local PC or tablet. Windows 8 tablets will be attractive to enterprises that want to continue running custom Windows applications, though they had better be x86 tablets since applications for Windows on ARM processors will require recompilation.

On the other hand, if you can run Windows applications just as easily on a Mac, Apple iPad or Android tablet, then Microsoft’s advantage disappears. Virtualization specialist VMWare is making that point at its VMworld conference in Las Vegas this week. In a press release announcing “New Products and Services for the Post-PC Era”, VMWare VP Christopher Young says:

As our customers begin to embrace this shift to the post-PC era, we offer a simple way to deliver a better Windows-based desktop-as-a-service that empowers organizations to do more with what they already have. At the same time, we are investing in expertise and delivering the open products needed to accelerate the journey to a new way to work beyond the Windows desktop.

Good for Windows, good for what comes after Windows is the message. It is based on several products:

VMView: enables users to work on a remote Windows desktop from a machine running thick or thin client Windows, Mac, iPad or Android. Some versions let you check out a VM for offline working. Virtual desktops have advantages over local ones, in that they are more manageable, more secure, and more robust. Zapping and reinstating a virtual desktop is easier than rebuilding the OS on a physical machine. The new VMView 5.0 claims up 75 percent bandwidth improvement and better 3D graphics. Performance is always compromised to some extent, versus a local operating system, but for many business applications it is more than good enough.

VMWare Horizon: A cloud identity platform which centralizes authentication and access management. You can think of it as VMWare’s cloud-based replacement for Microsoft Active Directory. It is currently focused on access to web-based applications but at VMWorld the company announced its extension to virtual Windows applications, a capability to be in beta by the end of 2011.

Project AppBlast: Lets users run virtual Windows application in an HTML5-capable browser running on any device.

Project Octopus: a data synchronization service to enable collaboration and data-sharing, which will link to VMWare’s other services.

VMWare’s advantage is its strong technology and that Microsoft allowed its own virtualization technologies, including Hyper-V and Remote Desktop Services, to fall behind.

That said, Microsoft has made a substantial effort to catch up in the last few years. Hyper-V and System Center working together form the basis of Microsoft’s private cloud, and under the covers the Azure platform is based on Hyper-V virtual machines. Microsoft’s advantage is the notion that if you are running Windows server and Windows applications anyway, you will be better off with the built-in virtualization features rather than a third-party solution. Microsoft can also afford to undercut VMWare’s prices, because it is bundling virtualization with its operating system. Microsoft has made it easier to run mixed VMWare and Hyper-V systems by supporting VMWare with System Center.

An entrenched competitor is hard to shift though, and VMWare appears to have won the argument with Dell, which has announced the Dell Cloud based on VMWare’s vCloud multi-tenant services.

What is interesting here is not so much the question of who runs Windows applications best, in a variety of virtual scenarios, but the extent to which VMWare succeeds in establishing its own identify system as the heart of an application platform that lets enterprises move seamlessly to a non-Windows world. In other words, VMWare Horizon is now VMWare’s most strategic product. If it succeeds, then it is not only Microsoft that will need to pay attention.

cloud computing, internet, microsoft, professional, software development

Microsoft partners are not whooping and cheering for Office 365

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There is a telling moment in the day two keynote at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference. “Now we’ve added Office 365”, says Corporate VP Jon Roskill. Do you guys feel the momentum?” There is a muted cheer, not the big whoop Roskill is looking for. “Now let’s have some momentum, whoo!” he repeats. Another barely audible cheer.

Why are partners not whooping and cheering?  Take a look at the Microsoft-commissioned Forrester report [PDF] on the total economic impact of Office 365. This report claims a remarkable payback period of only 2 months for a midsize organization moving to Office 365.

Looking at the figures in more detail, Forrester claims $54,000 saved over three years in eliminated hardware, $10,000 over the period in eliminated third-party software, $25,000 saved in web conferencing (Lync Online is bundled with Office 365), and $18,000 in “internal labor and professional services” saved on planning and implementation. There is an even bigger saving in support. Here I find it hard to puzzle out exactly what Forrester is claiming. It talks about “savings of $206,350 over three years” from simplified support and outsourced administration of infrastructure, but also refers to $146,250 costs in admin and support costs for Office 365; I am not sure if the $206,350 is a net figure. Forrester also throws in $260,625 saved on reduced travel thanks to online collaboration, which strikes me as highly speculative.

I suggest therefore that you do not take Forrester’s figures too seriously; but it is still worth noting that many of the savings come from revenue that would otherwise have gone to partners. How much partner income is lost will depend on the extent to which an organization outsources its IT admin, planning, support and administration, and on the margins partners achieve on things like third-party software; but it is considerable.

Of course there are also new business opportunities for partners. Presuming the savings from Office 365 and Microsoft’s other cloud offerings are real, a cloud-oriented partner has a strong sales pitch both to existing and new customers. Partners get an ongoing commission from subscriptions.

There is also an opportunity for new applications which link to cloud services. Yesterday Microsoft announced that the Windows Azure Marketplace, which used to offer data services and application building blocks, now also offers finished applications in US markets.

It is also true that Microsoft’s cloud offering is more partner-friendly than others, because it is a hybrid solution. Forrester’s report mentioned above assumes use of Active Directory Federation Services for single-sign on between on-premise and Office 365, a key feature which has been under-reported in the media coverage I have seen for Office 365. This feature, along with the fact that Microsoft’s server products like Exchange, SharePoint and Dynamics CRM can be deployed either online or as hosted services, means that there is flexibility over what is hosted and what is on-premise.

Nevertheless, it is hard to construct a reality in which the savings customers get from cloud services are real, without the further implication that total partner revenue will diminish, even though certain individual partners who take advantage of the new opportunities may end up winners.

This is true even if Microsoft succeeds in retaining all of its existing Microsoft-platform customers, rather than losing them to Google or other cloud providers. The consequences of a migration to Google, which is inherently not a hybrid platform, seem to me more severe.

Is there any way to put a positive spin on this, from a partner’s perspective? A couple of thoughts on this.

First, even if certain kinds of IT business are under threat from cloud migration, it is also true that the transforming impact of IT and the internet on businesses is far from complete. Much of what businesses currently do with IT can be greatly improved, there is still a thirst for new and improved business applications, and new technology including not only the cloud, but also massively parallel computing and of course mobile presents many new opportunities.

Second, it seems to me that partners should not be asking themselves how to maintain their business, but instead planning for change. It seems to me inevitable that the demand for skills in installing and nursing servers, deploying applications, and in maintaining and supporting clients, will diminish; and that is a good thing because these activities are IT plumbing and if they can be reduced it frees resources for other activities which have more business potential.

Behind the whooping and cheering, Microsoft’s message to partners is a tough one. Change, or die.