Microsoft's Cloud Can Be Profitable, Mgr Says
11 Février 2009 - 8:55PM
Dow Jones News
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) thinks it can make its cloud computing
strategy profitable fairly quickly, while also helping its
customers derive cost savings, a Microsoft manager said
Wednesday.
The services will be profitable "within a reasonable timeframe,"
Doug Hauger, general manager for Microsoft's cloud infrastructure
services, said at a conference in San Francisco.
Hauger said that the Redmond, Wash.-based software company was
preparing to disclose more detail about the way the services would
be priced and offered for its corporate customers within the next
month to six months. He was speaking at the Thomas Weisel Partners
Technology Conference.
Microsoft last October unveiled its plans for Windows Azure, a
platform that allows developers to write Microsoft-compatible
software that can be stored on and accessed from its servers.
Azure is the most significant step Microsoft, the world's
largest software company, has made toward cloud computing, where
software and data are housed off-premises and kept on servers that
allow it to be accessed via the Internet.
The company gets the vast majority of its $60 billion in annual
revenue from software products that are stored on-premise, meaning
a PC's hard drive or a company's server, such as copies of the
Windows operating system and the Office suites.
Hauger said that most of the cloud computing services Microsoft
is planning to offer, which include computing power, storage, and
database services, would be made available to customers on a
"pay-as-you-go" basis, but that some customers would be offered
"pre-pay services."
Pricing will be very competitive, Hauger said. "It's clearly
going to be beneficial (for a customer) to move to the cloud from
an economic perspective."
Microsoft is a relatively late entrant to the cloud computing
space, which has allowed rival companies including Google Inc.
(GOOG), Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and International Business Machines
Corp. (IBM) to make some headway in this market.
The company has to tread a difficult line between encouraging
its customers to embrace this new growth market without
cannibalizing sales of its core, on-premise products.
-By Jessica Hodgson, Dow Jones Newswires; 415-439-6455;
jessica.hodgson@dowjones.com