Is Microsoft your next big Open Source partner?

Cloud computing represents a generational shift in computing and nearly every organization right now is looking to figure out what does their journey to the cloud look like and which Cloud vendor will be their trusted partner to help them take advantage of everything the cloud provides.

Super important as part of that journey is to make sure that you can take advantage of all of the technology you use within the datacentre today, both Windows Server and Linux workloads. You want to be able to take full advantage of not just commercial software in the cloud but also be able to take advantage of the richness that Open Source provides to drive outcomes like digital transformation. If you look at cloud based workloads today, it is clear that a huge percentage of is dominated by Open Source, whether it’s for example in the Hadoop or No SQL space and whether it’s with new open source applications and container based development frameworks.

Given these market forces, even companies like Microsoft has transformed and are now comfortable to talk to organisations about Open Source in a surprisingly credible way. Across the engineering teams within Microsoft's Azure Cloud there is a deep investment in Open Source that has resulted in an impressive range and support of Open Source technologies, development tools and frameworks. The transformation doesn’t stop there, Microsoft is presently working on making some core technologies like SQL Server available on the Linux platform and have formed deep partnerships with key Open Source companies like Redhat. The traditionally commercial software company has also invested significantly in other many Open Source technologies like Docker, Hadoop, Eclipse, Jenkins and so many others.

High profile Open Source veterans are joining the company

This transformation has included their very own employees, with Microsoft’s engineers contributing of over 500 million lines of code into Open Source projects on GitHub. Several high profile Open Source veterans are joining the company, with one of the latest additions being Google engineer and Kubernetes founder Brendan Burns joining Microsoft Azure. The result of all of this momentum is clear to see in Microsoft's ability to capture the Open Source opportunity with today, one in every three Virtual Machines (VMs) on Azure running Linux and that growing every day. Another proof point is that almost every day you see another journalist or analyst making positive comments about how bold Microsoft is embracing Open Source and how it is putting the company on a path to be the clear leader in the cloud.

Why would Microsoft care about Open Source?

Now you may be asking, "Why would Microsoft care about Open Source?" Firstly, it's very important to understand that organisations are super interested in running Open Source solutions in the cloud. It’s a massive business opportunity to the tune of about 2 thirds of the global cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market opportunity. So it would be seriously bad business to ignore the fact that Open Source software is pervasive in what people want to achieve in the cloud. There are also seemingly countless options in the Open Source space from infrastructure through the application stack, developer tools, languages and through the management layer. In contrast, traditionally Microsoft was only able to monetized a tight, vertically integrated family of their own technologies.

In the Commercial Software space you develop software and handed it over to customers who pay a licensing fee for the rights to run that software in the data centres. In the Open Source on-premises world, software developers build software and make their money by providing support and maintenance services and not through software licensing.

"In the cloud world, there is no difference in how you monetize traditional Commercial Software (like Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, etc) and Open Source software"

So for the Microsoft of old, to build a business around Open Source software was difficult and contrary to the Commercial Software Model. However, in the cloud world, there is no difference in how you monetize traditional Commercial Software (like Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, etc) and Open Source software. You have the ability to rent the infrastructure, operations and intellectual property on a per minute basis. This means that Microsoft now has the opportunity to expand the array of solutions that they offer to customers, and it allows them to address new markets. The company now have many examples of how they successfully worked with a customer to implement their Open Source in the Cloud.

Microsoft's partnership with Redhat is a good example. Certainly many organisations are interested in deploying existing and new business critical enterprise class Linux infrastructure and Platform as a Service (PaaS) workloads to the cloud. With the Redhat partnership, Microsoft can offer them real enterprise grade support for Linux, and with an industry-leading framework for hybrid implementations as well. For these customers, they get the option to both a bring their own Redhat subscription or a fully endorsed on-demand pay-as-you-go downloadable image available on Azure marketplace. A unique capability due the partnership with Redhat is that they have a comprehensive support with co-located Redhat engineers in the Microsoft support Center, a key differentiator versus any other cloud competitor.

 Microsoft chose right by their company mission

Certainly some sensationalists are saying, 'Hell has frozen over' or 'They lost the war' and others are saying 'The market has spoken'. My view is that in a world where we can so easily and freely choose a particular path, and we have no choice in the often brutal consequences of that path, you'd better choose right. I believe that Microsoft chose right by their company mission to 'Empower every person and organisation on the planet to achieve more', and backing that up that choice with people, cash, code and culture. The benefactors of which are more choice for people to who want to achieve great things.