Software Outsourcing

As 2015 comes to a close, it’ll be remembered as a year full of surprises. Who thought back in April that the New York Mets would make the playoffs (along with the Chicago Cubs) and somehow make it to the World Series? While Microsoft was on pace to have a good year when 2014 was coming to a close, it was hard to imagine Redmond would gain such a high level of respect and dialog among so many longstanding critics.

If Goldman Sachs’ mea culpa last week wasn’t enough, when I picked up this week’s issue of Barron’s magazine, which is my Saturday morning ritual, I glanced at the cover and saw the headline, “The New Microsoft,” with Satya Nadella’s photo plastered on it. Usually when a company is featured on the cover of Barron’s, it’s because it has determined its stock is going to soar — or crater. In this case it was the former. Noting that since Nadella has taken over, Microsoft’s shares are up 48 percent — 67 percent if you go back to the day his predecessor Steve Ballmer announced he was “retiring,” it has emerged again as a growth company whose shares could jump another 30 percent. The article suggests, while Amazon’s AWS cloud business is Microsoft’s most significant competitor, the growth of Azure will give it a run for its money. At the same time, the author suggests Microsoft is a beneficiary of Amazon’s growth. In April, Amazon disclosed AWS’s revenues and profits for the first time, and its shares have since grown 70 percent.

Microsoft has gone all-in with its Azure Redis Cache service and plans to stop offering a couple of alternative cache services next year.

Microsoft will end its Azure In-Role Cache Service and its Azure Managed Cache Service on Nov. 30, 2016. Organizations should switch over to using Microsoft’s Azure Redis Cache service instead as it “provides more features and a better value overall,” according to Microsoft’s announcement late last week.

Redis is an open source NoSQL key-value database. Microsoft runs it as a service as part of its Azure cloud resources. The Microsoft Azure Redis Cache service is typically used by organizations with Web applications that need persistent data access for their operations, such as applications that perform financial transactions online.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise this week will announce plans to tap Microsoft Azure as a preferred public cloud provider, giving customers who were using its own Helion service a place to go when it shuts down Jan. 31.

CEO Meg Whitman revealed HPE will make Azure a preferred public cloud during the final earnings call for the company that was previously known as Hewlett Packard Co. for 86 years prior to splitting into two separate businesses (HP Inc. and HPE) Nov. 1.

Hybrid computing skills should be a focus of IT pros maintaining SharePoint environments, given Microsoft’s current cloud emphasis.

That’s one of the ideas that emerged this week in a talk by Jason Himmelstein, an Office Services and Servers Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and Todd Klindt, a SharePoint Microsoft MVP. They spoke on the topic, “SharePoint’s On-Prem Penalties: The Case for SharePoint Service in the Cloud.”

Microsoft this week rolled out new previews for organizations using its Azure Active Directory services.

The previews are notable for organizations trying to leverage Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory cloud-based authentication services with their on-premises Active Directory identity and access management infrastructures. To that end, Microsoft released a completely new offering, called “Azure AD Domain Services” on Wednesday. It also released previews of a few new Azure AD Application Proxy services.

Amid the slew of announcements at Tuesday’s AzureCon (a series of Channel 9 videos released by Microsoft outlining milestones and the future of the company’s enterprise cloud service), Microsoft revealed how its Azure Container Service will simplify the way organizations build, configure and manage clusters.

Specifically, Microsoft announced the Azure Container Service Resource Provider for the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) and released a preview of its new Azure Quickstart Templates, which are available for download on GitHub.

Microsoft quietly delivered a media bombshell of sorts this week as it explained that its Azure Cloud Switch solution was built with Linux.

“The Azure Cloud Switch (ACS) is our foray into building our own software for running network devices like switches,” explained Kamala Subramaniam, a principal architect for Azure Networking, in a Thursday blog post. “It is a cross-platform modular operating system for data center networking built on Linux.”