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Posts Tagged ‘SaaS’

Microsoft and the Private Cloud

Azure, Office 365, Dynamics On-Demand CRM – all of these are cloud services from Microsoft. We know the benefits – cloud services take the concept of hosting an application – or running your applications – and erecting a huge Somebody Else’s Problem field around it. Maintenance, scaling, feeding and watering all become problems that are Somebody Else’s. In that case, Microsoft’s, running in their Public Cloud.

But what if you can’t countenance the thought of your data being in Somebody Else’s hands? If your applications and data are sufficiently secret and confidential that you just have to keep them inside the firewall, then you can still take advantage of the cloud philosophy, and go for a Private Cloud.

One really cool example of application fabric for the Private Cloud is Microsoft’s on-premise Azure appliances.

This video from Microsoft discusses the ethos behind the Private Cloud, and how the virtualisation tools that we already use can make the Private Cloud a reality.

For more details check out the Microsoft Private Cloud portal (http://bit.ly/ff1w3C), System Center Virtual Machine Manager self service portal (http://bit.ly/e3vgyG) and Hyper-V (http://bit.ly/ikrKGw).

Technorati Tags: Azure, S plus S, SaaS, Virtualisation

Want to get into Azure for free?

Merry Christmas folks!

Here’s a lovely SaaSy Christmas present for you all!

In this video Steve Plank from Microsoft shows how MSDN Premium/Ultimate and BizSpark members can get some Azure services for free.

If you’re an MSDN Premium subscriber or BizSpark member, you can have 750 hours of compute a month, 10 GB of storage, 1,000,000 transactions, 5 service bus connections, 1,000,000 access control, 3x 1GB Web Edition Databases on SQL Azure.

Services by Subscription Level (no extra charge) * Premium, Ultimate & BizSpark
Windows Azure Small compute instance 750 hours / month
Storage 10 GB
Transactions 1,000,000 / month
AppFabric Service Bus Connections 5 / month
Access Control Transactions 1,000,000 / month
SQL Azure Web Edition databases (1GB) 3
Data Transfers Europe and North America 7 GB in / month
14 GB out / month
Asia Pacific 2.5 GB in / month
5 GB out / month

 

So now we have no excuses, right?

Technorati Tags: Development, Microsoft Azure, SaaS

Overview of Cloud Computing (SaaS, S+S and Microsoft Azure)

Whether we’re talking about Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), or Platform as a Service (PaaS), the cloud is really just another place to run your applications.

Microsoft’s vision of Software plus Services takes the basic offering of SaaS and augments it with on-premise productivity software such as Office.

In this TechNet video Brian Prince talks about cloud computing terminology, the role of the IT professional in cloud computing and Microsoft’s approach to the topic.

Brian also discusses the spectrum from on-premise, through hosted, cloud services and SaaS hosted applications.

  • In an on-premise scenario, I would be in charge of managing, feeding and watering my servers, with all the IT people that required.
  • In a hosted scenario, I would out-source some of that basal responsibility to my hosting provider, but I would probably be tasked with looking after the operating system and above.
  • In a cloud scenario, such as Azure, I delegate all the running and maintaining, patching and potentially even scaling of my solution to Microsoft or other third parties. If you’re interested in automatically scaling your Azure applications have a look at the Windows Azure Dynamic Scaling sample application (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/azurescale) and also at one service provider that’s offering this funcitonality as a service for Azure (AzureWatch from http://www.paraleap.com).
  • Traditional SaaS solutions are geared towards one-size-fits-all approaches, such as shared CRM, email or productivity solutions (for instance Office 365 and SharePoint Online).

Technorati Tags: Cloud, Microsoft Architecture, Microsoft Azure, Office 365, S plus S, S+S, SaaS

It’s been a couple of weeks since the event finished at the end of April, but I’ve finally got the video all edited and chopped into 10-minute segments for YouTube.

The slides for all the sessions for the conference are available here. Or you can go straight to my slide deck from my SkyDrive page here:

Nice :)

And here’s the 6x 10-minute clips as a single YouTube play list:

Co-presenting with me was my good friend and colleague Pete Jenkins, Managing Director of Feed My Guests Ltd down in Brighton. Many thanks to Pete for contributing such a quality case study section. There’s not many customers that would do that :) You can jump straight to Pete’s section here.

Many thanks to Matt Deacon at Microsoft and his team for running such a cool event. Thanks also to the Sales and Marketing folks at Valtech who helped organise our session and videoed the event for us!

For anyone on Facebook who still hasn’t added the Feed My Guests application, you can add it here!

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Microsoft Architecture, SaaS, Software as a Service, Software plus Services

Microsoft Architect Insight Conference 2008

Microsoft Architect Insight Conference

www.microsoft.com/uk/architectinsight

Valtech is sponsoring this year’s Architect Insight Conference. The theme for 2008 is “The Future of IT” – specifically focusing on the concepts of Disruptive IT and Software plus Services. The conference runs from April 28-29, in Windsor, UK. And there are still tickets left :) so go and register today!

We’ve got two speaking slots this year – one from my colleague Michael Barker on Service Oriented UI, and one from me on Software plus Services.

Maybe see you there!

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Architecture, S plus S, S+S, SaaS, Software as a Service, Software plus Services