Absolutely not! And here is my explanation …

IT teams today perform several functions and here are a few:
Infrastructure Management – Acquisition, deployment and management of servers and other infrastructure
Application Life cycle Management – Capacity Planning, Physical Design, Application Deployment, Management and Monitoring
Business Continuity – Ensuring 24/7/365 operation and support of both custom and packaged software applications
Governance – Security, Policy creation, Policy management, Data Protection, Identity, Risk Management
Information Management – Application Integration, Reporting, Backup, Data Mining and Analysis

What are the challenge that Cloud Platforms like Windows Azure, Amazon EC2, Saleforce.com and Google AppEngine address? They address the aspect of Infrastructure Management – removing the need to acquire, provision and operationalize Servers. But that’s only a portion of the functions that IT performs.

Cloud Platforms like Windows Azure make developing and deploying Cloud applications very simple, but the Architects and Developers cannot address management and governance? When we review a typical application lifecycle, management, versioning and maintenance form the long tail.

With the proliferation of the Cloud paradigm, IT can now truly be Information Technology management versus Infrastructure Technology management. As more applications in the portfolio move to the Cloud, IT has to play a pivotal role in ensuring that Cloud is effectively leveraged and critical business needs like Business Intelligence/KPIs are addressed to maintain competitive advantage in this global marketplace.

We got involved with Microsoft’s Cloud strategy almost 18 months ago. We had just come off doing a couple cool applications on other cloud platforms, notably Salesforce.com. When we were invited to participate in the Azure Design Preview sessions, we went in with some excitement, but mostly uncertain of the path ahead. And after 18 months of working on this, when I look back at what got released and read what critics say, I must say that I am truly giddy with excitement. Visual Studio Magazine tried to get a pulse of the Azure world pre PDC and prompted me to think about our experience. With all the recent activity around Azure, I wanted to share my perspective on Azure

During PDC Microsoft showcased some customer wins (one of whom we have been working for some time now), but it didn’t seem to pack the punch I had expected. There were some big names like 3M, Domino’s that were being showcased. I was looking forward to the actual release with real billing, partnership announcements and customer wins. And of course, more cool technology pieces.

Over the past few months, we have seen quite a surge in activity around customer interest in Azure and real world wins like this one and others are definitely paving way for the early adopters to understand the business value. And certainly things like partnership announcements with Intuit and NSF are raising the bar and expectations for the platform higher. Not be outdone on the technology side, impressive features like PowerPivot, Azure Drive, Velocity and the recent announcement of RDP support and VM management have certainly strengthened Azure’s promise.

Over the next couple of months, we will be talking a lot about our customer wins as we wrap up the engagements and I expect some these engagements to get quite a bit of attention. We are extremely happy to be a part of this journey and Azure is going to have a big impact on Cloud Computing.

1. What is the minimum expected Service uptime over a year ? How are services outages defined?
2. What are the Standard Operating Procedures during an outage ?
3. How can the Service Levels be monitored on an ongoing basis ?
4. What are the policies for compensating for the downtime ?
5. Is the Cloud Vendor amenable to my Audits if needs arise ?
6. Is the Access to data secure, encrypted and authorized ?
7. Is my company’s data segregated from other customer’s data ?
8. What happens to the copies of data when my contract expires ?
9. Can I specify where my data will reside and my application will run ?
10. Are these policies applicable to backed up data as well ?

I am excited about our 2010 product roadmap. We are announcing a new product – ManageAxis, focused on managing and monitoring Azure Hosted Services. It will be a Web based Portal that will serve as a single Portal to manage all your Azure applications. We are planning to release an early preview by the end of January 2010.

What is ManageAxis?

• Single Portal to manage all your Azure Hosted Services
• Dashboard view of the Applications health & performance and audit trail of actions
• Create and manage rule based Alerts for Hosted Services
• Simple and personalized Dashboard

If you are interested in signing up for the early preview, please send us an email (info@cumulux.com). Stay tuned …

Cumulux showcased the following at the PDC

1. Cumulux product – Mobile Axis -The first Enterprise mobility solution based on cloud using Azure

2. Cumulux Solution – Management of Cloud Applications including scaling, compliance, etc.

3. Cloudonomics – Cloud Economic Justification- How much can businesses save using the Cloud?

4. Cumulux Services – Cloud Assessments, prototypes, Architecture, Cloud Fit analysis etc

We had tremendous traffic in our booth and a great interest from attendees  in learning how Cumulux was executing on the vision of “Powering the Enterprise Cloud”.

Ranjith

Cumulux showcased the following at the PDC

1. Cumulux product – Mobile Axis -The first Enterprise mobility solution based on cloud using Azure

2. Cumulux Solution – Management of Cloud Applications including scaling, compliance, etc.

3. Cloudonomics – Cloud Economic Justification- How much can businesses save using the Cloud?

4. Cumulux Services – Cloud Assessments, prototypes, Architecture, Cloud Fit analysis etc

We had tremendous traffic in our booth and a great interest from attendees  in learning how Cumulux was executing on the vision of “Powering the Enterprise Cloud”.

Cloudonomics Kiosk

Visit our Self Assessment Kiosk to see how much you can save by using Windows Azure and compare it with other Cloud Platforms like Amazon EC2 & Google App Engine.

Mobile Axis

Enterprise Mobility solution powered by Windows Azure

Mobile Axis™ is an enterprise mobility solution built on Windows Azure, that empowers business users to make swift business  decisions through their mobile devices with access to essential enterprise data and applications like Sharepoint, CRM & ERP systems.

Azure Technology Showcase

Cumulux will be showcasing the following Azure solutions

Dynamic Scaling: Learn how to monitor, manage and automatically scale Azure applications.

Multi-tenancy: Explore how to build and secure reliable and scalable multi-tenant systems.