Nick Carr has been wondering whether Microsoft is about to embark on some “vast data center push” that will advance it much faster down the road towards cloud computing.

Not so, says Ray Ozzie. When I spoke to him last week, Microsoft’s chief software architect was nothing if not ambitious (one day, he said, “most major enterprises and many, many, many independent developers will be running their services in our datacentres” - this is the report of the conversation.) But this is what he had to say about the pace at which those datacentres will get built:

“If you step back and say, yes the company’s going to bet big, what is the most responsible [way] from an investor and business standpoint to do that? So you start by securing dark fibre, you start by securing land… and you start building the shells of buildings so that when you need the capacity the lead time is as short as possible to get that stuff in there. You never want to get caught with inadequate capacity at a certain point in time.

Right now the properties that predominatly use the capacity that we have are the MSN properties, the Windows live properties, and there are a lot of smaller ones. Search is the one that takes the majority of the physical computers in there. Over time that mix will shift just dramatically [towards running services for third parties.] As we produce platforms and tools that let third parties use our infrastructure, the nature of how we pre-purchase, how quickly we purchase, will depend on how popular those services are.”

For Microsoft, that new business has barely begun: 

“We’re going to our enterprise customers saying, help us to help you understand how quickly you’d like to go from a world of servers to a world of mixed servers and services, or just pure services. Third party developers, we’re not even in the game yet.

I think expecting a step function of suddenly day one we have 50 new datacentres, I don’t believe that it’s actually going to transpire that way, simply because of the risks involved with taking on this new model.”

March 10th, 2008 in Software | Permalink