Tag Archives: cloud computing

Microsoft stated in August that it is increasing prices for Microsoft 365 (formerly known as Office 365), the increase being around 20%, from March 1 2022. The company argues that prices have not changed substantially for ten years – perhaps contentious since it has introduced premium plans that are more expensive – and that “this updated pricing reflects the increased value we have delivered to our customers over the past 10 years.”

There has been inflation of around 2% per annum since 2011 and there have been need features, so a price increase is not unreasonable. However there are some other changes in the pipeline that are more difficult. This is the thing called the New Commerce Experience that impacts both customers and resellers. Finding out what has really changed is not that easy but if you dig through the fluff about “agility” and “alignment” and “streamlining”, there are some standout changes:

Customers that want the flexibility to reduce seat count will pay 20% more. Until now, it has been possible to reduce seat count without penalty, even though Microsoft presents its pricing as for an “annual term.” With NCE, customers can either pay by the month with premium prices but the ability to reduce seat count with a month’s notice, or pay less but commit to seats for one or three years. During that period, seat count can be increased but not decreased.
Reasonable? The problem perhaps is that it means giving up one of the benefits of cloud, which is elasticity. Or at least, you can still have elasticity but it is going to cost more. We have also seen this with reserved instance pricing on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform: the price comes down substantially if you commit to paying for one year or more.

There will be no cancellation allowed after the first 72 hours of a term, as explained here. This may impact partners more than customers. Scenario: partner sells 1,000 seats of Microsoft 365 for a 3-year term to some company. Three months into the term, the company goes bust. Partners are saying that this leaves them on the hook for the remaining cost. Here, for example, Australian distributor Dicker Data states that “If a customer (who has the agreement with Microsoft) no longer want or can finish the payment of the contract (bankruptcy for example), the partner will incur the costs of paying the remainder of the contract to Microsoft.”

One hopes that such matters are negotiable, but it is a significant risk especially in these unpredictable times of pandemic and climate change.

microsoft, tech

Microsoft Financials: strategic purpose of Github, Teams and PowerApps revealed

April 25, 2019 Tim Anderson

Microsoft has announced its quarterly financial statements, reporting revenue of $30.6 billion, up 14% on the same period last year.

The story seems to be largely more of the same, which is good for the company in that all its numbers look good.

The most striking figure is 73% increase in Azure revenue. Azure is the smallest of its three self-defined segments though, though all three are similar in size. “More Personal Computing” (Windows, Surface and gaming) delivered the most revenue, followed by Productivity and Business Processes. That said, at this rate of growth Azure will soon be the biggest of the three segments.

Aside: has there ever been a dafter segment name than More Personal Computing? More than what?

Quarter ending March 31st 2019 vs quarter ending March 31st 2018, $millions

Segment	Revenue	Change	Operating income	Change
Productivity and Business Processes	10100	+1236	3979	+864
Intelligent Cloud	9649	+1780	3208	+554
More Personal Computing	10680	+763	3154	+631

The segments break down as:

Productivity and Business Processes: Office, Office 365, Dynamics 365 and on-premises Dynamics, LinkedIn

Intelligent Cloud: Server products, Azure cloud services

More Personal Computing: Consumer including Windows, Xbox; Bing search; Surface hardware

Some points to note. Microsoft reported a “material improvement” in Azure gross margin, something which does not surprise me. In my experience, the Azure Portal does a great job (from Microsoft’s perspective) in steering you towards premium services and extras, as I found when trying Windows Virtual Desktop – check my note on the VPN Gateway at $140 per month).

Office 365 is still growing, up 30% according to Microsoft’s slides. LinkedIn is also increasing revenue, up 27%.

Despite Chromebooks and mobile, Windows is still a cash cow with revenue from Windows OEM Pro up 15% year on year. Consumer revenue is down 1%.

In the earnings call CEO Satya Nadella called out Teams as “bringing together everything a team needs” (well, apart from a proper shared calendar).

CFO Amy Hood remarked on what she called “strategic areas” by which she means I think areas that drive adoption:

We will invest aggressively in strategic areas like Cloud through AI and Github, Business Applications through Power Platform and LinkedIn, Microsoft 365 through Teams, Security, and Surface as well as Gaming.

Note that Github is seen as a way of persuading developers to use Azure services, and note also the important attached to the Power Platform. Power platform? Here it is:

The Power Platform is today comprised of three services – Power BI, PowerApps and Flow … It is a system that enables users to do three key actions on data that help them drive business: Analyze, Act, and Automate. We do this with Power BI, PowerApps, and Flow, all working together atop your data to help EVERYONE, from the CEO to the front-line workers, drive the business with data.

says CVP James Phillips.

The piece that particularly interests me is PowerApps. Microsoft spent years looking for a modern successor to Visual Basic, app development within reach of non-specialists (kind-of). In PowerApps it believes it has the answer:

PowerApps is a “citizen application development platform” – allowing anyone to build web and mobile applications without writing code. The natural connection between Power BI and PowerApps makes it effortless to put insights in the hands of maintenance workers, teachers, miners and others on the frontline, in tailored and often task-specific applications

says Phillips.

So if VB was a driver for Windows adoption, then PowerApps will push you towards Microsoft’s cloud-hosted business applications.

microsoft, office 365, tech

Microsoft quarterly financials: strong figures, note LinkedIn and Dynamics numbers

February 1, 2019 Tim Anderson

Microsoft has released its financial statements for the quarter ending December 31 2018. Sometimes it seems that all the talk is of Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon, but Microsoft continues to deliver strong results.

That said, it is an increasingly corporate story. The company still has a presence in gaming, both on Xbox and PC, and reports Xbox software and services growth of 31%. Consumers still buy Windows and Office; there are now 33.3 million Office 365 consumer customers.

There is no longer a PC in every home though. There might be an old one; but PCs now tend to be bought for specific purposes such as gaming or home working. There are plenty of other options for casual home computing. Windows OEM revenue is down 5%.

It is a different story in the business world. Office 365 is still motoring, with revenue growth of 34% year on year. A spin-off benefit is that Dynamics 365, once a poor cousin to Salesforce for cloud CRM, now reports revenue growth of 51% year on year, despite the product’s eccentricities and high price. The key is integration and upsell: get users hooked on Office 365 for email and documents, and compelling add-ons become an easy sell.

Rather to my surprise, Microsoft’s LinkedIn acquisition seems to be working. Revenue is up 29%, session numbers are up 30%. My anecdotal experience bears this out. People are actually acquiring and doing business via LinkedIn, even though it suffers from masses of bad data and the usual perils of social media (fake accounts, scammers, harassers and so on). For now, users seem to be able to manage these problems and interact with the right people.

Azure revenue is up 76%.

All well in Redmond then? The risk is that the company’s narrowing focus will leave it vulnerable to competitors who take advantage of their control of the end points (clients): smartphones, tablets, smart devices running Linux. Even now the web browser, with the Edge team now integrating Google’s browser engine, Chromium, rather than building their own.

For now though, Microsoft powers on.

Here is the breakdown by segment, such as it is:

Quarter ending December 31st 2018 vs quarter ending December 31st 2017, $millions

Segment	Revenue	Change	Operating income	Change
Productivity and Business Processes	10100	+1147	4015	+678
Intelligent Cloud	9378	+1583	3279	+447
More Personal Computing	12993	+823	2964	+454

The segments break down as:

Productivity and Business Processes: Office, Office 365, Dynamics 365 and on-premises Dynamics, LinkedIn

Intelligent Cloud: Server products, Azure cloud services

More Personal Computing: Consumer including Windows, Xbox; Bing search; Surface hardware

tech

Microsoft’s 82 Ignite announcements: what really matters

September 24, 2018 Tim Anderson

Microsoft’s PR team has helpfully summarised many of the announcements at the Ignite event, kicking off today in Orlando. I count 82, but you might make it fewer or many more, depending on what you call an announcement. And that is not including the business apps announcements made at the end of last week, most notably the arrival of the HoloLens-based Remote Assist in Dynamics 365.

Not all announcements are equal. Some, like the release of Windows Server 2019, are significant but not really news; we knew it was coming around now, and the preview has been around for ages. Others, like larger Azure managed disk sizes (8, 16 and 32TB) are cool if that is what you need, but hardly surprising; the specification of available cloud infrastructure is continually being enhanced.

Note that this post is based on what Microsoft chose to reveal to press ahead of the event, and there is more to come.

It is worth observing though that of these 82 announcements, only 3 or 4 are not cloud related:

SQL Server 2019 public preview
[Windows Server 2019 release] – I am bracketing this because many of the new features in Server 2019 are Azure-related, and it is listed under the heading Azure Infrastructure
Chemical Simulation Library for Microsoft Quantum
Surface Hub 2 release promised later this year

Microsoft’s journey from being an on-premises company, to being a service provider, is not yet complete, but it is absolutely the focus of almost everything new.

I will never forget an attendee at a previous Microsoft event a few years back telling me, “this cloud stuff is not relevant to us. We have our own datacenter.” I cannot help wondering how much Office 365 and/or Azure that person’s company is consuming now. Of course on-premises servers and applications remain important to Microsoft’s business, but it is hard to swim against the tide.

Ploughing through 82 announcements would be dull for me to write and you to read, so here are some things that caught my eye, aside from those already mentioned.

1. Azure confidential computing in public preview. A new series of VMs using Intel’s SGX technology lets you process data in a hardware-enforced trusted execution environment.

2. Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise. Currently invite-only, this is intended to make it easier to write business bots “to improve workforce productivity” – or perhaps, an effort to reduce the burden on support staff. I recall examples of using conversational bots for common employee queries like “how much holiday allowance do I have remining, and which days can I take off?”. As to what is really new here, I have yet to discover.

3. A Python SDK for Azure Machine Learning. Important given the popularity of Python in this space.

4. Unified search in Microsoft 365. Is anyone using Delve? Maybe not, which is why Microsoft is bringing a search box to every cloud application, which is meant to use Microsoft Graph, AI and Bing to search across all company data and bring you personalized results. Great if it works.

5. Azure Digital Twins. With public preview promised on October 15, this lets you build “comprehensive digital models of any physical environment”. Once you have the model, there are all sorts of possibilities for optimization and safe experimentation.

6. Azure IoT Hub to support the Android Things platform via the Java SDK. Another example of Microsoft saying, use what you want, we can support it.

7. Azure Data Box Edge appliance. The assumption behind Edge computing is both simple and compelling: it pays to process data locally so you can send only summary or interesting data to the cloud. This appliance is intended to simplify both local processing and data transfer to Azure.

8. Azure Functions 2.0 hits general availability. Supports .NET Core, Python.

9. Helm repositories in Azure Container Registry, now in public preview.

10 Windows Autopilot support extended to existing devices. This auto-configuration feature previously only worked with new devices. Requires Windows 10 October Update, or automated upgrade to this.

Office and Office 365

In the Office 365 space there are some announcements:

1. LinkedIn integration with Office 365. Co-author documents and send emails to LinkedIn contacts, and surface LinkedIn information in meeting invites.

2. Office Ideas. Suggestions as you work to improve the design of your document, or suggest trends and charts in Excel. Sounds good but I am sceptical.

3. OneDrive for Mac gets Files on Demand. A smarter way to use cloud storage, downloading only files that you need but showing all available documents in Mac Finder.

4. New staff scheduling tools in Teams. Coming in October. ”With new schedule management tools, managers can now create and share schedules,employees can easily swap shifts, request time off, and see who else is working.” Maybe not a big deal in itself, but Teams is huge as I previously noted. Apparently the largest Team is over 100,000 strong now and there are 50+ out there with 10,000 or more members.

Windows Virtual Desktop

This could be nothing, or it could be huge. I am working on the basis of a one-paragraph statement that promises “virtualized Windows and Office on Azure … the only cloud-based service that delivers a multi-user Windows 10 experience, is optimized for Office 365 Pro Plus … with Windows Virtual Desktop, customers can deploy and scale Windows and Office on Azure in minutes, with built-in security and compliance.”

Preview by the end of 2018 is targeted.

Virtual Windows desktops are already available on Azure, via partnership with Citrix or VMWare Horizon, but Microsoft has held back from what is technically feasible in order to protect its Windows and Office licensing income. By the time you have paid for licenses for Windows Server, Remote Access per user, Office per user, and whatever third-party technology you are using, it gets expensive.

This is mainly about licensing rather than technology, since supporting multiple users running Office applications is now a light load for a modern server.

If Microsoft truly gets behind a pure first-party solution for hosted desktops on Azure at a reasonable cost, the take up would be considerable since it is a handy solution for many scenarios. This would not please its partners though, nor the many hosting companies which offer this.

On the other hand, Microsoft may want to compete more vigorously with Amazon Web Services and its Workspaces offering. Workspaces is still Windows, but of course integrates nicely with AWS solutions for storage, directory, email and so on, so there is a strategic aspect here.

Update: A little more on Microsoft Virtual Desktop here.

More details soon.

amazon, android, azure, google, tablets, tech

Microsoft’s strong financials, and some notes on Azure vs AWS and the risks of losing in mobile

July 20, 2018 Tim Anderson

Microsoft delivered another strong set of figures in its latest financial results, for the period April-June 2018. Total revenue of $30.085 million was up 17% year on year, and all three of the company’s sectors (Office, Azure and consumer) showed strong growth.

What’s notable? Largely this is more of the same. A few things to note. Linked in revenue increased 37% year on year – an acquisition that seems to be making sense for the company. Dynamics 365 revenue grew by 65%. The Dynamics story is all about cloud synergy. As an on-premises product Dynamics CRM (the part of the suite I know best) was relatively undistinguished but as a cloud product the seamless integration between Office 365 and Dynamics 365 (and Azure Active Directory) makes it compelling.

Windows 10 is doing OK, possibly as more businesses heave themselves off Windows 7 and buy new PCs with OEM licenses as they do.

Even areas in which Microsoft is far from dominant did well. Gaming was up 39%, Surface 25% and Search advertising up 17%.

The biggest growth in the quarter, according to the breakdown here, was in Azure. up 89%. This growth is not without pain; the Register reports capacity issues in the UK South region, for example, with users getting the message “Unfortunately, due to high demand for virtual machines in this region, we are not able to approve your quota request at this time.” You can still create VMs, but not necessarily in the region you want.

Will Microsoft outpace AWS? My take on this has not changed. AWS does very little wrong and remains the pre-eminent cloud for IAAS and many services by some distance. What AWS does not have is Office 365, or armies of Microsoft partners helping enterprise customers to shunt more and more of their IT infrastructure into Azure. Microsoft makes more money from licensing: Windows Server, SQL Server, Office 365 and Dynamics seats, and so on. AWS does more business at a lower margin. These are big differences. I see it as unlikely that Azure will overtake AWS in the provision of essential cloud services like VMs, containers, cloud storage and so on. AWS also has a better reliability track record. However, the success of Azure means that enterprise customers no longer need to go to AWS to get the benefits of cloud. Perhaps the more interesting question is the extent to which AWS (or Google) can persuade enterprise customers to shift away from Microsoft’s high-margin applications.

Longer term, there is significant risk for the company in its retreat from mobile. We are now seeing Google work hard in the laptop market with Chromebooks alongside Android mobile. Coming sometime is Google Fuchsia which may be a single operating system for both. It is worth recalling that Microsoft built its success on winning users for its PC operating system; and that IBM lost its IT dominance by ceding this to Microsoft.

Here is the breakdown by segment, such as it is:

Quarter ending June 30th 2018 vs quarter ending June 30th 2017, $millions

Segment	Revenue	Change	Operating income	Change
Productivity and Business Processes	9668	+1140	3466	+575
Intelligent Cloud	9606	+1784	3901	+990
More Personal Computing	10811	+1576	3012	+826

The segments break down as:

Productivity and Business Processes: Office, Office 365, Dynamics 365 and on-premises Dynamics, LinkedIn

Intelligent Cloud: Server products, Azure cloud services

More Personal Computing: Consumer including Windows, Xbox; Bing search; Surface hardware

cloud computing, tech

AWS embraces hybrid cloud? Meet Snowball Edge

July 18, 2018 Tim Anderson

Amazon has announced Snowball Edge, an on-premises appliance that supports Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), AWS Lambda (“serverless” computing) and S3 (Simple Storage Service), all running locally.

Sounds like Microsoft’s Azure Stack? A bit, but the AWS appliance is tiny by comparison and therefore more limited in scope. Nevertheless, it is a big turnaround for the company, which has previously insisted that everything belongs in the cloud. One of the Snowball Edge case studies is the same general area as one used by Microsoft for Azure Stack: ships.

The specifications are shy about revealing what is inside, but there is 100TB storage (82TB usable), 10GB, 20GB and 40GB network connections (GBase-T, SFP+ and QSFP+), size is 259x671x386mm (pretty small), and power consumption 400 watts.

Jeff Barr’s official blog post adds that there is an “Intel Xeon D processor running at 1.8 GHz, and supports any combination of instances that consume up to 24 vCPUs and 32 GiB of memory.”

You can cluster Snowball Edge appliances though so substantial systems are possible.

Operating systems currently supported are Ubuntu Server and CentOS7.

Amazon’s approach is to extend its cloud to the edge rather than vice versa. You prepare your AMIs (Amazon Machine Instances) in the cloud before the appliance is shipped. The very fast networking support shows that the intent is to maintain the best possible connectivity, even though the nature of the requirement is that internet connectivity in some scenarios will be poor.

A point to note is that whereas the documentation emphasises use cases where there are technical advantages to on-premises (or edge) computing, Barr quotes instead a customer who wanted easier management. A side effect of the cloud computing revolution is that provisioning and managing cloud infrastructure is easier than with systems (like Microsoft’s System Center) designed for on-premises infrastructure. Otherwise they would not be viable. Having tasted what is possible in the cloud, customers want the same for on-premises.

Office and Office 365

Windows Virtual Desktop

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