This week is the Microsoft (now annual?) Professional Developers Conference PDC 2009 in Los Angeles. We are expecting lots of news about current and future Microsoft products and news about the company’s cloud computing strategy.
Microsoft, side by side with Amazon, Google, SalesForce and maybe Yahoo! is a player in the cloud computing space and with products like Windows Azure, SQL Azure, Microsoft Online Services (BPOS), Exchange Online, certainly one of the heavyweights in everything cloud.
As always, this year’s PDC is first and foremost a conference for developers. And Steve Ballmer is right, a successful infrastructure, platform or service requires “developers, developers, developers”. So they will be getting quite an earful about the Microsoft cloud story. It will be a big coming out party.
But let us not forget we are not there yet. In today’s world of traditional computing, powered by servers in closets, server rooms or datacenters you need highly skilled and experienced IT Professionals keeping things performing, up to date and alive. But what will happen to admins, IT Pros and network and server guys once we use our apps in the cloud?
One of the goals for this blog is to provide IT Pros with the necessary insight and information about “cloud computing”:
- What is this thing “the cloud”?
- Who are the players in the cloud?
- How do their offerings differ?
- On-premise vs. off-premise
- Private cloud vs. public cloud
- XaaS (Everything-as-a-Service)
- What should an IT Pro expect 1, 3, 5 years after PDC2009?
Stay tuned for more information about PDC and beyond.
