Microsoft: Hosters Need to Catch Up

To make sure the well-balanced relationship between Microsoft and hosters worldwide says this way, Elliot Curtis stressed at the Hosting & Cloud Transformation Summit, that he saw no competition whatsoever, and that web hosting providers should not see one either.

Microsoft's plans are to deliver cloud services to consumers and businesses and to keep selling the almost $1 billion a year in services and licenses to hosters.

The Director of the North American Hosting Partner Channel for Microsoft said that there is enough place for everybody on the marketplace, so there is basically no need to worry.

“We believe the market is large enough for us, but also for our service provider partners,” he said .

“We believe the market is enormous and there are many customers who will not want to provision services (directly) from Microsoft.”

He presented the relationship between Microsoft and the web hosting providers as an opportunity and not a risk: “we’re a global provider with our Azure platform, but we’ll also take the learnings and innovation from that and deliver them to the marketplace to provide building blocks for our customers.”

Curtis added though that in order for many hosters to remain on the market, they need to adapt and upgrade their services and infrastructure.

”We understand that hosters have been pioneers in this space, we get that, you really have been leaders, but make no mistake: this business is accelerating.”

He estimated that the number of servers to move into the cloud could reach 300 million and reminded that all of this will need huge investments in infrastructure, in order to support the workloads.

“Think about moving up the value chain and delivering IT as a service,” he told the web hosting providers, according to Data Center Knowledge.

“Our goal is to evaluate what we do well, and also what our partners do well.”

The Azure apps are only at the beginning and hosters still have between 12 and 18 months to go before “impact”.

“We are in very, very early days with our appliance,” Curtis said but “we expect that over the next 12-18 months it will become more available.”