Some Companies Choose Microsoft's Cloud Service Because They're Afraid of Amazon (cnbc.com)

"In the cloud wars, Microsoft has been able to win big business from retailers, largely because companies like Walmart, Kroger, Gap and Target are opting not to write big checks to rival Amazon," reports CNBC: The more Amazon grows, the more that calculation could start working its way into other industries -- like automotive. In a recent interview with CNBC, Volkswagen's Heiko Huttel, who runs the company's connected car division, said the carmaker chose Microsoft Azure late last year for its "Automotive Cloud" project after considering Amazon Web Services... "If I take a look at all the competitors out there, you see they have capabilities in disrupting you at the customer interface," Hüttel said. "Then you have to carefully choose who is really getting down into the car, where you open up a lot of data to these people, and then you have to carefully choose with whom you are doing business."

Microsoft likes to tout the merits of its cloud technology, but the company is fully aware that taking on AWS, which has a commanding lead in the cloud infrastructure market, isn't just about offering the best services... Microsoft doesn't break out Azure revenue, but analysts at Morgan Stanley estimate that it accounted for almost 10 percent of sales in the latest quarter.

Comments

Also if your company is afraid of the public cloud

[williamyf]

Microsoft's Azure Cloud offerings can be used Public, Private and true hybrid cloud types. Unlike amazon, which is 99.9% public cloud at the moment. And google, which is 100% public cloud.

Which means that, as your strategy shifts, you can go from Public cloud to hybrid clud to private clud with the same software stack.

Many companies are afraid of cloud technologies in general, and even more so about public clouds, and use this technology out of necesity, rather than desire. Other companies like the cloud, but would be deligthed to get everything inhouse if, for examle, what started up as a small project, grows so large that is cost-effective to do so (think DropBox).

While is true that there are SW layers that let you deploy in a "Cloud stack agnostic" fashion, those add a layer of complexity, appeal to the lowest common denominator, and show a technological lag.

Realisticaly, only Azure and OpenStack* can claim an uniform software stack between public cloud, private cloud and true hybrid cloud...

* There are others, like VMware, but their public cloud offering is marginal at best.

Re: It's crossed my mind as well

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

microsoft = software. amazon = marketing. some companies are smart because amazons IT will never compare to microsofts IT.

Errr, no.

The company I'm consulting with right now has done in-depth studies of AWS, Google, and Azure. They eventually want to have a setup where they can, at will, move their services between any of the big 3 providers.

They've been having all sorts of meetings with reps from all 3 trying to see what they can do, and I've no doubt that eventually they'll be able to do this (easily shift services from provider to provider).

In the most basic terms, this is the way things stand:

First off, in case you didn't know, AWS is IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service while Azure is PaaS - Platform as a Service. (No one knows what the fuck Google is yet.) These two approaches obviously have some serious implications as to how you deploy and manage your stuff, so you'll want to either know what the fuck you're doing or pay someone smart look at your operation and tell you which makes the most sense for you.

AWS is far and away the most flexible and "featurific" of all three. Whatever it is you want to do, AWS can do it. AWS also offers the most bang for the buck, especially at scale. AWS uptime and file persistence is beyond excellent, it practically borders on science-fiction. You could nuke 90% of the world and all of your precious S3 files would still be perfectly safe. Their overall security posture is outstanding. For the moment, AWS is king, end of story.

Azure is getting there, but it's got a long way to go. MS knows this and as a result Azure reps and dev groups will do ANYTHING you ask for. ANYTHING, including happily replicating any AWS features or functionality that you would need in order to get you onboard. And they'll do it on their dime.
For example, MS paid a 3rd-party dev team to build (from our specs) an entire service catalog for us in Azure, in the hopes that we may use them in addition to AWS. It was a piece of the puzzle that we needed and MS paid to have it built. Azure is hungry and motivated. Amazon should keep an eye on their rear-view mirror for Azure.

Google is in last place, and they aren't nearly as feverish about developing their cloud as you would expect them to be. We meet with them and it's always a little too relaxed. I honestly have no idea what they've done or delivered.