Microsoft & Cloud Services

Banyak orang tidak mengetahui bahwa sebenarnya Microsoft benar-benar serius bergerak menuju ke arah Cloud Services (layanan awan). Microsoft memiliki strategi untuk aplikasi, platform, bisnis infrastruktur untuk semua pelanggan konsumer maupun perusahaan. Microsoft melakukannya dengan sangat serius, dan menanamkan investasi yang sangat besar. Microsoft melihat peluang bisnis yang sangat besar untuk semua pelaku IT.

Cloud services ini sendiri sebenarnya merupakan bagian kecil dari arsitektur besar Microsoft yang disebut sebagai S+S (Software plus Services), yang menggabungkan antara aplikasi client/server yang dimiliki pelanggan sekarang dengan layanan awan. Arsitektur ini sebenarnya bukan monopoli Microsoft, karena hampir semua pelaku IT juga melakukannya, dan menyebutnya dengan berbagai istilah yang berbeda-beda.

Dimulai dari catatan Ray Ozzie yang dipublikasi di sini (28 Oktober 2005) : http://news.cnet.com/Ozzie-memo-Internet-services-disruption/2100-1016_3-5942232.html , perlahan-lahan arsitektur Cloud Services Microsoft mulai disusun. Microsoft mulai meluncurkan banyak aplikasi-aplikasi online seperti Windows Live, Bing, XBOX Live, Office Live, Microsoft Online Services, Dynamics CRM Online, Windows Azure, SQL Azure dan sebagainya. Banyak di antara produk-produk itu merupakan hasil evolusi dari produk-produk server yang pindahkan ke awan, dan bisa diakses secara publik.

Visi Ray yang dipublikasikan pada tahun 2005 ini diamini oleh banyak pemain besar di industri IT, mulai dari Adobe, sampai Google dan IBM beberapa tahun kemudian :

• “We are taking a balanced approach, and are building a hosted infrastructure. It’s not just about the cloud, but also about the desktop. There are some who are all about the cloud while others think about the desktop first. We have a hybrid approach, and we are doing that with our products like AIR.” - Kevin Lynch, CTO, Adobe (August 2008), http://gigaom.com/2008/08/04/the-gigaom-interview-kevin-lynch-cto-adobe-systems
• “The real opportunity that the cloud offers large companies today is as a supplement or complement to their in-house operations rather than as a complete replacement” - Nick Carr “Rough Type” blog (April 2009), http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/04/the_big_company.php
• “…larger companies…can be expected to pursue a hybrid approach for many years, supplying some hardware and software requirements themselves and purchasing others over the grid. One of the key challenges for corporate IT departments, in fact, lies in making the right decisions about what to hold on to and what to let go.” – Nick Carr, “The Big Switch”, pg. 118
• “Microsoft's Software + Service strategy has rapidly matured and is native to Exchange 2010. This architecture of a single environment that spans on-premise and cloud-based gives large firms an opportunity to leave some mailboxes on-premise and host others in the cloud to save money without incurring admin hassles.” - Ted Shadler, The Forrester Blog for Information & Knowledge Management Professionals (April 2009), http://blogs.forrester.com/information_management/2009/04/exchange-2010-tier-your-workforce-split-your-domain-save-money.html
• “Economics of IT are changing, and many companies are looking at combinations of on-premise software and software as a service.” - Rishi Chandra, Product Manager for Google Enterprise (June 2008), http://www.intelligententerprise.com/blog/archives/2008/06/google_sees_clo.html
• “There are things you can do in desktop apps that you can't do in Web apps” - Linus Upson, Google Engineering Director, http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10227150-2.html
• “IBM believes this view neglects to consider that large enterprises are not going to outsource their entire data center operations to a public cloud like Amazon’s. Different workloads demand different support, and as such, there are certain applications that shouldn’t be moved to a cloud model.” – IBM (April 2009), http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=16384
• "It's unlikely than an organization will strictly choose one path or the other when it comes to SaaS and software services that are built in-house. Every organization will likely continue to have a mix of existing applications, SaaS subscriptions, and now through SOA, a collection of reusable components, Web services and business processes…" - Sandy Carter, vice president of SOA and WebSphere strategy at IBM (August2008), http://www.crmbuyer.com/story/PVN9X8ztpLGcvl/Mixing-It-Up-With-SOA-and-SaaS-Part-2.xhtml
• “But a new model has emerged powered by fantastic experiences at the front end and platform delivered as a service on the back end” - Steve Fisher, SVP Platform Division, Salesforce.com, http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Adobe-Targets-the-Enterprise-with-SAP-Salesforce-Integration
• “Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff … to announce a partnership to sell customers on the hybrid cloud idea – an initiative called ‘The Best of Both Worlds.’  For Benioff, who until now has marketed Salesforce with a ‘Software is Dead’ slogan, that’s quite a shift…” - Fortune on the shift to cloud computing (October 2009), http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/10/22/a-kinder-gentler-cloud/

Baru-baru ini Microsoft memperkenalkan produk barunya Windows Azure Platform dan Office 2010, yang merupakan komponen terakhir dari Microsoft untuk memberikan solusi Cloud Services paling lengkap di pasaran. Solusi Microsoft sekarang mencakup semua aplikasi, platform, infrastruktur, dan semuanya bisa diberikan sebagai suatu layanan.

Peluncuran produk baru ini meninggalkan semua lawan Microsoft, yang sekarang harus bermitra satu sama lain untuk menandinginya….

Pertarungan yang menarik sekali untuk disimak. Let’s see siapa yang akan unggul :)

Sayangnya di Indonesia pertempuran ini belum bisa jelas disaksikan, mengingat infrastruktur jaringan broadband yang masih lemah, juga tingginya tingkat pelanggaran hak cipta (Intellectual Property Right) yang membuat banyak pelaku industri IT ini enggan menanamkan investasi besar di negara ini.