Clearing the Fog Around Microsoft's Cloud Computing Offerings

A closer look at the Windows Azure Platform and the Business Productivity Online Suite.

Cloud computing. Everyone is talking about it. But cloud computing takes many forms. You may wonder what each cloud option is for and how cloud offerings differ from each other. Even if you limit the discussion of cloud computing and consider just two of Microsoft's cloud offerings, the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) and the Windows Azure Platform, there's room for lots of confusion. You're not alone if you could use some clarification about how BPOS and Windows Azure fit together and how each offering relates to IT and business needs right now. Let's talk.

The BPOS Front
Microsoft has been packaging and licensing suites composed of its server and management products for years. Some server licensing packages you might be familiar with are Small Business Server (SBS), Essential Business Server (EBS), and -- going way back in time -- BackOffice Server. With such packages in mind, you can think of BPOS as just another suite of Microsoft products -- the difference being that the BPOS products you access in your organization are physically located in Microsoft data centers instead of in your facility.

Dharmesh Singh, a principal program manager on the Microsoft BPOS team, explains, "BPOS is a licensing suite, a set of collaborative end-user services that runs on Windows Server, Exchange Server and SQL Server -- the same products that are available for use inside an organization." The cloud aspect, Singh continues, is that these products are "running in a data center on a shared, multi-tenant architecture."

BPOS Standard packages Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting and Office Communications (OCS) Online. According to Singh, the inclusion of Office LiveMeeting and OCS is a key differentiator between BPOS and competing solutions from Google Inc., which has no comparable offering. Given economic considerations related to travel, LiveMeeting and OCS provide an alternative that directly results in cost savings for businesses.

Another BPOS version is the Business Productivity Online Deskless Worker Suite. This version is aimed at organizations that just want basic e-mail and document collaboration capability. It includes Exchange Online Deskless Worker (mailbox, calendar, contacts and Outlook Web Access Light with anti-malware) and SharePoint Online Deskless Worker (read-only access to portals and write access for filling out forms).

When you look at the BPOS components, it's clear why they're offered together: They address the most common tasks of the information worker. From the IT perspective, putting these applications in the cloud gives IT the ability to focus on core business competencies, such as a specific industry's technology or proprietary applications that can make or break the business.

As Singh puts it, "From an IT perspective, BPOS is appealing to IT decision makers, or CIOs or CTOs. They're the business guys who look at core collaborative capabilities -- e-mail, telephony, document collaboration -- as mission-critical applications, but not something that gives them true business advantage. They need these functions, but the basic plumbing necessary to do business does not give them any competitive differentiation. It's an infrastructure need."