I was invited by Microsoft to their Build 2013 event in San Francisco this week - and it was an interesting experience, contrasted to the modest events I used to attend in Europe with Microsoft - last century. Microsoft moved the event from Seattle last year to San Francisco and was blessed with unusual and nice warm weather and over 6000 attendees. Supposedly the event sold out in a mere 3 days, attendants were global, we chatted with attendees from 15 different countries, Latin America the most prominent region.

Day 1 Keynote

Microsoft's product landscape is breathtaking and to pack that all into two keynotes must have been a challenging game of riches. I don't want to to focus too much on the more consumer focused Day 1 - there the relevant news for the enterprise were that Windows 8.1 will come out soon, and the desktop will be more prominent and you will even be able to boot your machine to the desktop again. From all spontaneous applause during the keynotes - this was the most energetic and lasting one. Clearly Microsoft has taken the tile concept a little too far on the PC. But all in all fairness Microsoft should get credit for trying to get one consistent user interface across smartphone, tablet, and PC - and even more for rectifying the issue relatively quickly. And personally I do not think the issue lies with the tiles, but with the light weight nature of the Metro apps. Yes they need to support touch, but they don't need to be oversimplified... I was glad I heard some attendees even talking about the tile dummification since I felt often like that...

 
 
 
Ballmer also made clear that Microsoft is in the transition from a software company to a company that builds software powered devices (e.g. the Windows tablets) and software powered services (e.g. Azure).
 


After Ballmer it was time for the only woman to take the stage, Julie Larsen-Green showed how Windows 8.1 improves touch on small factor devices. She showed a more powerful Bing in connection with Maps that now provides a search across SkyDrive, XBox, HDD etc. - a good feature and similar to what Google showed at Google I/O. The accepting a Skype call without unlocking the computer or logging in is a nice feature - but begs the question who was logged in before - as otherwise in Skype as we know it today - the call will not be delivered. The added multimon capabities will be very welcomed in Windows 8.1 - not just by developers! And keeping DPI scaling dynamic, not determined by the primary monitor will be appreciated by millions of eyes using Windows.

Next it was Antoine Leblond to keep showing more new functionality but from a  more technical angle. And my impression was - when enterprise vendors talk about 100s (see e.g. enhancements of Workday in Update 19 here) - then Microsoft needs to speak in 1000s - e.g. Windows 8.1 will introduce another 5000 new APIs for developers. Granted - no one needs and uses them all - but that is a massive scope for dot release.  The good news - all this APIs are usually one liners to use - at least in the demos. Microsoft pays tribute to scripting languages here - one line, one statement, one API, one action. Developers do not have to hit the enter key as much as a decade ago...
 



And rightfully Microsoft creates value by making their development tools more complete. Adding a visualization and tooling for estimated power consumption certainly will help developers to reduce the power hunger of their mobile apps. And everything gets more connected and easier - e.g. a wizard to create mobile push alerts - delivered through Azure.

There were tons of more consumer, hardware, graphics and game whizbangs - but the endless collection of new capabilities here and firsts there becomes tiring - check out my twitter stream of the keynote. And granted this is a challenge for every keynote - but maybe Microsoft is trying to do too much for a Build conference audience - pitching both consumer capabilities and developer tools and productivity enhancements. Tough to get under one roof or in one keynote.
 


Then it was back to Gurdeep Singh Pall to show the latest on Bing. From his part  of the keynote it is very clear now, that Microsoft is trying to become a platform company, that brings together all the different pieces of the large Microsoft product family all the way rom Bing to enterprise software. And Bing will expose  more granular services and will make them available across for other products and services. 

But the best demo of Build2013 was only to follow - a preview of Project Spark by Dave McCarthy and Rusty McClellan. It's from the gaming world - but has enterprise software relevance - as we witness the potential travolgimento of an entire industry. With Project Spark Microsoft transforms every Windows8 machine and xBox into a game design work station. In the few minutes of the demo, we witnessed the creation of a complete game, that was instantaneously playable. This has profound consequences on the gaming industry, where the game may start creating, extending, tuning and sharing it. Before you even play it. Crowd sourced projects of multiple designers are equally possible... If you ever tried to build a game 30+ years ago with TurtleGraphics - you would have been speechless, as have I. 

Now if any of this creativity and personalization could be brought to the enterprise space...
 

 
 

Day 2 Keynote

On Day 2 Nadella opened the keynote and positioned the day to be the day for the backend. And Azure has come a long way. He claimed significant adoption of Azure – with 50% of the Fortune 500 using it, 250k customers overall and the addition of 1000 customers per day, and over 3.2M organizations using it with 65M active users. And Azure stores 8.5T storage objects per day and about 900k transactions per seconds. And there are 18+ data centers and 100+ co-locations. That is some serious workload and investment, and just 2 months after the GA of Azure as IaaS, the IaaS payload is already at 20% of overall payload (but it had the benefit of a long beta period).
 

 

Azure has one of the industry most diverse payloads

Nadella continued with pointing out how the firstparty applications (these are the Microsoft owned ones) keep Microsoft honest and to remain committed to the overall IaaS game. And to his point Azure today runs 300k servers alone for the Xbox community, SkyDrive has 250M accounts and 50M users of Office Web Apps. And then there is Skype with 190M users. And Bing is becoming more exposed to become a platform and uses Azure more and more, for instance for and expected 1B of notifications per month.

 
Luckily for customers, Microsoft assumes a first party equals third partywhich  means that Azure customer loads are treated equally to Microsoft loads. An interesting argument as it would mean that it would take away any spare capacity considerations for the Azure cloud capacity. Which puts enormous pressure on the virtualization and elasticity capabilities of Azure – but later more on that.

 

Microsoft expands light blue stack

And true to previous announcements, Microsoft is opening Azure beyond the usual Microsoft tools and technologies – Nadella mentioned making Oracle a first class citizen, adding support of Java to existing node and PHP support. And while we applaud Microsoft to this step – it needs to realize that it will be difficult to create loyalty in this community beyond the IaaS deployments without more support in scaffolding and tooling. But it’s early days and remains to be seen where Microsoft goes with that.

 

Visual Studio - already with Oracle DBMS
deployment capability

Websites? Websites! Websites?

I was surprised with Nadella starting the use cases of Azure with websites. Not something I was expecting too much of the Microsoft technology stack to be used. But the following demo showed again Microsofts new leitmotif of a platform that is easy to use – mostly with oneliners: In a demo a number of web site feature and animations were shown. And they were easy to create and maintain. So web site building seem to be one key focus for Microsoft, even made GA for a dedicated product – Windows Azure Websites.

 

Mobile matters

Micosoft has made it easier than ever to create mobile applications, true to the direction of exposing more services in the Azure platform. The good news is that developers can now deploy their applications not only to Windows Mobile, but also to Android and iOS.   And needless to say that Windows Azure Mobile Services went… GA at Build.

 
Next it was Scott Guthrie’s turn on stage – finally – putting some light on what is going on at the backend to enable all these mobile apps and websites.

 
 

Finally – Auto-scale

To dynamically ramp up computing resources in Azure you had to write custom scripts or use other tools to enable this key cloud quality. So finally Microsoft has addressed that by adding auto-scaling capability to Azure. And for most apps this is a welcome change, as it puts the sizing burden, under a given SLA to the provider, in this case Azure. But some specific apps may have to be build up the trust in this brand new features. But at the end of the day the auto-scaling of a cloud provider should bet by far the average capability of an app provider to write scale up and scale down assets for a cloud infrastructure.

With the new auto-scale feature Azure can scale for websites, cloud services and virtual machines, the pretty standard folding lines to tackle scaling nowadays. 

Now for the sizing of websites administrators can scale by min / max instances and target CPU utilization. And on the services side, the scaling seems to be service specific, Charles Lemanna showed scaling by CPU as well as queue depth – which is a nice capability, making scaling less technical and more business related. And lastly for virtual machines there is auto-scale capability between a min / max of instances. And with the recent industry change to minute billing and Azure not charging for stop VMs – this can equate into significant money savings.

 

Identity, Identity

For all cloud projects, identity matters greatly, so not surprisingly Microsoft focuses on this – and given it’s hold on Active Directory this is a home run easily. Being able to transfer Active Directory entries and privileges between on premise and cloud is a key claim on the cloud properties of the future. So Microsoft allows the easy federation of on premise Active Directories to Windows Azure Active Directory. And added an easy console that allows to add user privileges to other standard SaaS apps and platforms – we saw Box, Basecamp – but also Salesforce.com and Google Apps. Even AWS.

 
To prove the oppeness point the omnipresent Box CEO Aaron Levie came on stage – the surprise being that Box and Sharepoint do not have the easiest of relationships. But Build is not a collaboration and documentation management conference – but a developer conference. And have a co-opetitor on stage attesting to the new found openness of Microsoft certainly helps. And Levie obliged to fill the role.

 

BizTalk for Business Integration

And of course BizTalk cannot be missing here – if you want to attract enterprise class applications. Not surprisingly the examples was how hard it is to integrate a SAP system with other applications – SaaS or non. And Microsoft is re-using the already previously built adapters to SAP, Oracle, Siebel and JD Edwards (which shows a bit how dated the product is). But re-use is good and BizTalk services can make these adapters available through modern JSON and REST APIs, which make them much more easy to consume.

 
But even more value is created with the BizTalk servers being available in the cloud – what was a tedious, time consuming installation on premise – is now merely a mapping exercise of (hopefully) working APIs. A big deployment advantage for the cloud and shows how even old on premise assets like a BizTalk adapter to JD Edwards can get a fresh start with being deployed from the cloud.

 

Examples of out-of-the box authentication capabilities

BigData not missing

Needless to say Azure has a BigData strategy, which runs on top of the capabilities of Windows Azure Storage. With the recently launched HD Insight offering, it’s easy to spin out Hadoop clusters to the cloud.


 

Equally relational databases can be spun out to Azure. Oracle’s DBMS being the most recent addition and prominently featured in below snapshot. 


 

Office for enterprise apps

A little bit surprising – but in line with the overall platform services strategy, Microsoft also exposes Office / Office 365 capabilities to be used in Azure. The demo example that was chosen was very document centric, and was a good one – recruitment. In the demo a decent good recruitment application was assembled in mere minutes. Office 365 provides new data types, like eg all documents of an user. And the demo tied it together with SharePoint and with the corporate social network (Yammer?). But there is not only document, but equally social and networking capability – as well as email capability. No more worries of building pseudo email clients into enterprise applications – now just authenticate to the user, use his emails, send them on his behalf – and all – if you stay loyal to the Microsoft framework – in a pretty and consistent user interface to the Office apps. 

 

Azure... and the 7 dwarfs?

At some point in the keynotes - it started to remind me a little bit of Snow white - lot's of little helpers - so in likely infringement of copyrights I created the below collage of (Princess) Azure being aided by the 7 dwarfs...
 
 
But cartoonish views aside - the ability to support Azure - in the case of Active DIrectory even by just moving the product into the cloud - are opening new perspectives. As when for example more Bing is being used, more Bing will have to be put onto Azure, which by itself again provides more platform and better services to applications, which drive more usage to Azure. It's all connected to positively propel itself ahead. 
 
 

MyPOV

Microsoft has picked up considerable speed - at least judging from the outside. I do not recall an enterprise software event with so many GAs being casually dropped left and right. The good news is that the company sees to listen - most notably around the new release of Windows 8.1 and the return of the desktop as the dominant control center of all actions Windows. 
 
It is clear that the push to services is coming to fruition and all pieces of the Microsoft product realm are helping the use Azure, helping by providing services. If Microsoft orchestrates this right, it will be able to create a mutually beneficial symbiosis between the products providing platform services and their own respective growth. And Microsoft has done a great job with exposing these services in a simple and consumable way, we expect this to help adoption significantly.

And lastly - the newly proven commitment to openness - with the partnership with Oracle giving proof of that - should make Azure more attractive to future payloads. 
2013 (C) Holger Mueller - All Rights Reserved

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