Each year Microsoft holds their annual Hosting Summit in the Seattle area and this year marked my 6th year attending on behalf of Applied Innovations. The hosting summit is an opportunity for Microsoft to meet with their top hosting partners, about 400 were invited out of the 2500 active hosting partners. What’s most interesting about the hosting summit is that each for the past 7 years, Applied Innovations has been mentioned, on stage or spotlighted in during a keynote and this year was not exception with Applied Innovations showing up in a number of places and my favorites were:
- Our case study around our AwesomeCloud.com private label cloud infrastructure business and how we acquired and then migrated the customers from Kansas to Miami, FL with minimal downtime was spotlighted in the attendee guide.
- I was interviewed over skype about the cloud and how it’s changing business globally and this was played during the starting keynote
- Our interaction with the Microsoft teams around System Center, Microsoft Windows 2012 and the CloudOS vision were mentioned in multiple sessions.
But the hosting summit is more than just recognizing key Microsoft partners like ourselves, it’s an opportunity to learn first hand what Microsoft’s strategy and direction around hosting will be in the new year (Microsoft’s Fiscal Year is July to June oddly enough). This year there was of course a big push on the Cloud OS (previously blogged about: http://jesscoburn.com/archives/2013/01/28/microsofts-vision-of-the-cloud-os-and-what-it-means-to-you-and-me/)
What I found most interesting though is that Microsoft is really focused on service providers delivering:
- Hosted Desktop on Top of Windows Server 2012 (A key offering of AwesomeCloud (ACS))
- Hyper-V hosted Windows Servers (A key offering for both AppliedI and ACS)
- Windows Azure Services for Windows Servers.
Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Lync, Exchange and Office365 came up a fair bit too. It was Windows Azure Services for Windows Server that I thought hasn’t got a lot of discussion and I’m going to wait until next month to really blog about that because we’ll have some very exciting news to share. Something many people don’t realize is that the same technology that has been built by Microsoft for massive scale is available and can be deployed in a managed dedicated environment with AppliedI (and ACS). That’s really the core of the CloudOS vision is that whether it’s on-premise (hosted in your own datacenter or office), hosted by Microsoft (in their Azure datacenters) or hosted by us (your favorite service provider) it’s the same technology, the same tools and the same customer experience. And I think that’s fantastic! You see, I realize you’re going to host your data where it makes the most sense for the workload in question and by being able to leverage the same everything, it’s just that much easier for you and at the end of the day our brand promise to is “Always Available, Always Easy” and this falls right in line because it’s going to be that much easier for you to manage it.
So I’m happy to report that Applied Innovations and it’s business direction is in line with the Microsoft Cloud Vision and we’re positioned to continue to be your partner of choice for all things Windows Cloud. Oh and if you’re wondering, next month I’ll be attending (and speaking at) HostingCon in Austin, Tx and in July I’ll be heading back to Texas but this time Houston to attend the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. If you’re local to either of those cities, I’d love to buy you a cup of coffee and chat about your business and how we can better serve your Cloud Hosting needs.