Microsoft 'leads the enterprise cloud era'

An internal Microsoft email has revealed the company believes it was right to take the risk regarding betting its future on the cloud.

Revealed via the company's official blog post, Microsoft announced a wave of product updates including changes to Windows Azure services, a significant update to the server line-up (Windows Server, System Center, SQL Server) and new tools (Visual Studio) all built for the cloud.

"Two years ago we bet our future on the cloud and quietly refocused our 19 billion-dollar software business by completely transforming our products, culture and practices to be cloud-first," said Satya Nadella, president of the Server & Tools business, Microsoft in an email to staff.

"We knew the journey would be long and challenging with plenty of doubters.

"But we forged ahead knowing that the cloud transition would change the face of enterprise computing.

"As it turns out we were right to take this risk. Because of the fundamental shifts the cloud brings, more than 2 trillion dollars of overall IT spend is now up for grabs."

In an address to over 90,000 employees, Nadella spoke at length about the effects of software-driven data centers, connected apps and Big Data.

"It starts with the rapidly exploding world of devices and a new generation of connected apps that are revolutionising life and business," he said.

"Software-driven data centers are making access to computing resources infinite and elastic.

"Big Data is changing the way we gain insight and act in business, science and society.

"Cloud is the central architectural paradigm that makes all of this possible."

Speaking at the company's North American TechEd, Nadella says that to enable such a transformation, Microsoft had to make "deep changes to our organisational culture."

"Every one of our division's nearly 10,000 people now think and build for the cloud – first," he said.

"Our engineers live a "live-site" first culture to better respond to our customers in real time.

"And we are laser-focused on building more complete end-to-end service scenarios, or modern workloads, to deliver more value to our customers and partners."

Check out Nadella's cloud vision below:

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