New Zealand is one of the top-most adopters of the Windows Azure platform among independent software vendors (ISVs), and if indications are anything to go by, it might soon be one of the top enterprise adopters of the platform as well.
According to Scott Guthrie, corporate VP of Windows Azure at Microsoft this adoption rate is not only due to the flexibility, openness and consistency provided by the cloud platform, but also the general innovative nature of enterprises in the country and their willingness to try relatively new technologies.
Guthrie, who is set to present a keynote at Microsoft's TechEd in New Zealand tomorrow, tells Computerworld, “Some of our biggest customers are from this region. One of our more famous ones will be the All Blacks, who are currently in the process of moving their website to the Azure platform. They will be running on our stack soon, and that includes the whole CMS and elements of the backend.”
Guthrie says that the Redmond giant is also seeing traction from New Zealand in terms of partners who want to plug in their software and integrate with the platform to enable global customers to tap into their services.
“The Windows Azure Store, which is relatively new, is a way for partners to provide their solutions and use the Microsoft enterprise sales force to grow their business. GreenButton is a good example of a NZ ISV that is about to go into the store. Windows Azure is really about developing the ecosystem and that is how it is going to work,” says Guthrie.
The store has currently around 50 partners with solutions on it. Microsoft curates the store to ensure that quality is maintained, and Guthrie states that they are more focused on maintaining this than adding partners at a fast pace.
Going forward, Azure will look to tap into this ecosystem to provide more analytics and intelligence tools to customers.
“There is a whole lot of information that is locked up at the enterprise customer’s end. We want to give them the ability to get their insights from this data and grow from them dramatically.
“All of our efforts are linked to giving the customer what they want. We are always collecting feedback from the customer and putting it back into the update cycle. In New Zealand, we have people who are focused entirely on Azure and they tap into several other dedicated resources globally to ensure that customers get what they want from the platform,” he says.
Microsoft’s TechEd is set to take place over four days from tomorrow at Auckland. The 18th TechEd in the country is expected to bring in more than 2400 delegates, making it one of the largest IT congregations in New Zealand.