Good to hear the different views from the panelists on the Cloud and what it means to them.

Good to hear the partners say “Partners, partners, partners”. Continuing to allow the partners to add value, as soon as the products and solutions are only available as a resell it will become tough to work together.

Another comment that is really core to the Hosting Business I’m responsible for resonates well with the panel: Connect the partners across the eco-systems to help them build new business together.

Is Virtual Desktop a viable model and is there a difference between Europe and the US?

No real clarity on the markets being different is coming out of the discussion.

* YouSaaS is big in Virtual Desktop business and uses it as a way to provide end customers with choice of both Microsoft and 3rd party applications

* Rackspace doesn’t offer it and is not getting asked for it.

* Use the Virtual Desktop to retain control and allow users more freedom to choose their hardware and local applications.

Dan had a great metaphor with Cloud as the iceberg. The visible tip of the iceberg is what the end users see and all the underwater parts are the ‘enabling technologies’ that just the Service Providers see.

Use of Cloud Computing Services

April 2008 quick check from TR1 shows 78% was not using, 15% don’t know and the rest would fit somewhere in between.

October 2008 poll shows not much progress in the uptake.

Most use is for Internet application Hosting, Databases, Disaster Recovery (DR). So it’s the SaaS providers using this as the infrastructure to run their apps.

Storage is most likely going to be the big winner when looking at Cloud in the SMB potentially some server replacement but much more they will be buying the pure SaaS offerings that run on the Cloud.

The real opportunity will be in the Mid-Tier Enterprise for both the SaaS apps as well as the more raw services.

Top Internet Applications

• Now: Messaging/Collaboration, CRM & BI, BPO & productivity, Accounting
• 2012: HR & Accounting, Filer Server replacement, Internet-based NAS and Storage

So bottom-line Cloud will become the platform

What do Customers need from Cloud Computing???

• Over 50% is asking for Flexibility; 40+% Low Cost; 40% IT move to opex
• Most interesting is that Green IT, Billing, Branding and Ease of Use scored a zero in the TR1 poll

What are the Hosters challenges to deploy Cloud services?

Not the technology or the how-to do it but the Other Priorities. Also selling it showed as a challenge

Top Managed Hosting Cloud Players according to TR1

• OpSource On-Demand & Connect
• Mosso (Rackspace) Slicehost, CloudFiles
• StrataScale’s Ironscale (RagingWire)
• Flexiscale (XCalibre)
• Terremark Infinistructure
• Savvis Utiliity
• Layeredtech on-demand storage
• Nirvanix

How not to lose in the Cloud:

• Security, Compliance, SLA, Availability, Cost vs In-House,
• Legacies and willingness to change, Hostile software licensing regimes, Hype

How to win:

• Understand your target audience. Are you focusing on SMB’s or ISVs or SaaS? Also look for synergies and partners
• Use Virtualization Solutions. CHoose to be a Cloud Infrastructure Provider or be a fully integrated PaaS.

Doug is doing another example of 5 level leadership at the MS Hosting Summit. If you want to see more check this YouTube vid of his story on the Beatles.

Watching the old Beatles TV material is showing of screaming girls, crying out loud. Doug is positioning how the Beatles are a great example of a business that is willing to take a risk before the rest of the market does.

But then … we’re just not all a Beatle… sigh.

Now on stage in the Bellevue Westin at the MS Hosting Summit is Eddie Amos, Server and Tools business.

Balancing capex and opex is the reality of many business when it comes to investing in IT. Mixing on-premise with online services leads into the software plus services model. He’s having some good examples of how the enterprise is mixing their on-premise software with services like off loading payroll to ADP.

Eddie is giving a great update on the many things we already do but apparently have kept way to secret. Good to see that BizSpark finds quite some people to raise their hand as one they know about.

Software plus Services has reached a point where the hype seems to have passed and most of our customers and competitors now embrace, still in their own wording and models, but it’s clear that just cloud or just on-prem are not the way forward.

Partners are front and center in the S+S strategy and vision. It has been proven that partners drive the innovation curve faster and more agile, which is key to the overall success of the partnership.

Another element of the success moving forward is choice and interoperability. On top of Windows Server and Windows Azure with .net and php the key is to provide industry standard connectivity through SOAP, REST and XML.

THE OPPORTUNITY FOR HOSTERS

Windows Server and Windows Azure provide an opportunity for Hosters. Windows Azure can become a part of the set of services Hosters can use and add to their datacenter based set of services. Use Windows Azure to offload certain workstreams with a different economic model. The message is mix and match to provide your customers choice.

More details on Windows Azure at the World Wide Partner Conference in July this year. Stay tuned.

Finally we’re revealing a program to help partners benefit from co-branding their expertise. The Microsoft Communication Services program will launch at WPC later this year. Demo’s and logos to help partners that invest in our platform.

To get this you have to get the Hosting Competency and make sure you join us at the Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans in July.

Managed hosting is still where the margins are. Partners should focus on being (or becoming) the trusted advisor and competing on value and ROI – not price.

Tier1 data projects 25% segment growth from 2009 to 2010 and 24% for the year after.

John also shows the updated IDC data with the economic climate factored in a November 2008 paper. Upward adjusted CAGR to 17.5% over 2008-2012. They uplifted the July2008 release of this research from WW SaaS Revenue forecast to move from 16B$ to about 20B$ by 2012.

Just picking on the trends slide with the Developers and ISV component. We’re calling out to partners that these ISVs needs reliable partners to host and manage their apps. Check the Incubation Center program if you’re interested in learning how we educate and expose our hosters to this opportunity.

POWER OF CHOICE

Let there be no mistake: partner hosted is still the way to go. First evidence: 2 pillars of the business show partner-hosted direct and partner-hosted white label as ways to go. Second point of evidence: lots of tools and materials (Hyper-V whitepaper, Hosting Deployment Accelerator, Hyper-V fast start programs….)

The kick off of the day was done in style… a story on survival of the fittest by Doug Keeley, CEO and chief storyteller. The amazing story of Shackleton illustrated the intro of managing and leadership in tough times.

Martha Bejar on stage to outline the vision and strategy of the Communication Sector. Personally I think we finally reached a point where the Software plus Services starts to show an integrated message to the partners.

Busy day ahead. If you’re around and want to meet come and find me! I’m looking for ideas and feedback on how we can keep the momentum on Software plus Services going with the ISV’s. What’s your experience in bringing them on the platform?

Just back from a great session with the S+S Incubation Center partners that join us this week in Bellevue, WA for the MS Hosting Summit.

Main themes of the discussion were around lead generation and promoting offerings. An interesting topic for discussion with all partners was launched after Richard Dym from OpSource showed some of his metrics on how they find and win new ISVs.

Inbound marketing using the web, seo an d events are proving to be the most effective tools to drive pipeline. So far no surprise. The time from lead to order has doubled from 2007 to 2008 with now being an average 222 days.

A key indicator that the ISV market moving to S+S and SaaS is clearly slowing in the economic climate, despite upbeat reports from IDC and Forrester.

This raised the question on what it would take to get ISVs to move faster? Is it by focusing on the Hosting Partners’ key competencies of infrastructure, 24/7 monitoring and availability? Or is it by helping the ISVs to generate new business from reselling other services, to bring money into the operation?

What do you think? Are you seeing the slowdown in turning leads to orders?

Back in Bellevue since Sunday. Couple of the observations of the last 2 days;

1) It’s still busy in the Bellevue Mall :-) maybe a few shops have fell over but most are still there and the Mall itself has had a nice touchup… recession????

2) My strategy of stretching night 1 after arrival from Amsterdam is working… not a lot of issues with the jet-lag

3) Tully’s vs Starbucks day 2 = 3:0, might be just because they’re in the lobby of the Hyatt

Made the bold move this week and wiped the Thinkpad T61P to do a clean install of Windows 7 x64 and have no regrets… it rocks!

The main reason for the 64-bits version is to have access to all 4 Gigs of mem, being willing to give up some apps/devices but to my surprise almost everything just works… almost everything except the sync with my HTC phone.

Not sure if that’s the lack of a x64 device driver for the phone or something else, I will dive into it later this week.

What I like:

* The toolbar – been reading some reports of people that don’t like it but for me it works to keep the desktop organized. The only thing I notice is that clicking the Outlook icon on the left starts another instance of Outlook rather than opening the already running app.

* The Device Center – great single view of the devices on my system and their status

* Network Center – way much better organized especially if you have both Wifi and LAN connections.

I’ll do some more testing this week as I’m on the road to Copenhagen to speak at the Microsoft Hosting Day for my team in Communication Sector over there.

Things I want to check are (hopefully) extended battery life, presentation mode with dual screens, access speeds of public wifi at the airports I visit …

I will be back :-)

Posting from the Office…

Move over browser-based editing … here’s the brand new Windows Live Writer!

It’s great to see how Software+Services as a vision is getting translated into new products in the Windows Live family. One of the examples is the offline Blog editor that comes with the download of the set of Live Services.

Windows Live Writer requires almost no work to get going on your blog service. It’s a so much nicer way to create, edit and publish your postings. The greatest feature: you can prep your contributions offline and push them to the server when you connect (if you need to ofcourse).

I’m going to be playing around with this for the next couple of days, but the first experience is a simple, easy deployment.

What a great morning here at the Hosting Summit.  Highlights from the presentations accross all is that SaaS or S+S is no longer just hype but a business reality. Particularly for the hosting provider business this is both a challenge as much (or maybe even more) a super opportunity.

I'm not surprised as my day to day work is all about getting the ISVs connected with the hosters. The Incubation Center program is all about that. Greg Urquhart from the MS US ISV team called out this number of 60% of the ISVs looking at hosters as the partner to move to a SaaS model. And I believe that's a number that is even bigger in some of the International markets.

Another 2 great announcements are about Softgrid 4.5 coming to SPLA in the fall, finally I want to say. I have seen many partners look at Softgrid as a tool to move apps into the hosting infrastructure without changing the core of the app.

Another announcement is related to the SQL 2008 Web Edition, at a low (very low) pricepoint this will be a definately serious alternative for smaller, start-up ISVs that will help to match the cost base with the maturity of their business. The good part here is that scaling the requirements up to a clustered, high available solution will be much more seamless than moving from a free database technology when you get out of prototyping or grow as a business into a higher SLA requirement.

Hosters need to move up the valuechain if they want to survive and increase the margins and not get hit by the 'Gorrila's' (fun pun from John Zanni's pres today calling that collective 'amazooglesoft') :-)

I noticed a lot of interest from both the hosters present, as well as the technology vendors at the event, in what Microsoft is doing with the Incubation Center program. It appears to strike some of the right chords where it comes to assiting ISVs with the business challenges of moving to SaaS.

So, here we are in Bellevue, WA. It's the time of year again for the WW Hosting Summit. Our groups annual event where we focus on connecting our great community of hosting partners with the exec's and industry leaders who focus on the Software + Services business.

The focus this year will be on how we can help the hosting business to move up the value chain and how we can get our partners to identify new channels to increase their reach. Sounds interesting? I think it's not just interesting but a huge necessity if we look at what's happening in the hosting business today.

The agenda looks very promising with a mix of MS execs and industry peers both from the analyst community and hosting providers it should provide some great insights to the some 300 hosters that will be joining us over the next 3 days.

Personally I'm keen to enage with the small group of dedicated partners in our SaaS Incubation Center program. Since the launch in 2006 this group has slowly expanded and has helped a significant number of ISVs in the move to a Software as a Service business model, especially on the sales and go-to marketing side of their business. The experience has learned us that a fair share of the ISVs are particularly fighting with the marketing and sales challenges of the new business they enter. Since the event is closed and invite only I will continue to post the highlights and findings from the event over the next couple of days. STAY TUNED!

BTW we officially went WorldWide today with the SaaS Incubation Center program. What started as an idea little over 8 months ago was kicked off in Europe in November and now covers 8 partners, 4 in the US and 4 in Europe. Mary Jo Foley was one of the first today to cover the release;

Microsoft to help other software vendors go the SaaS route by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley -- While Microsoft is attempting to distance itself from other software-as-a-service (SaaS) players, the Redmond software company is trying to help other software makers move to the SaaS distribution model.