The blogosphere was flooded with sarcastic comments when Microsoft announced the future Windows Azure Platform Applicance offering at WPC earlier this month, quickly dubbed “Azure-in-a-Box”. eBay and large datacenters will implement Windows Azure cloud infrastructures in large server centers, supported by HP, Dell and Fujitsu.  But cloud in a box sounds like a contradiction, right? Cloud computing was supposed to provide endless scale and elasticity, how could you get this if confined to a single container? 

 I think the more dogmatic cloud prophets are missing the larger point. Yes, global clouds provide scale benefits and reduce cost– but the BIG disruption is the potential of a standardized application platform across public and private domains. So, what will this do?

Windows Azure is a platform offering. It merges the traditional stack of hardware, operation system and application infrastructure into a single platform API. When this platform is implemented inside the corporate firewalls as well as on the global cloud, it will turn the enterprise software market upside down. Applications developed on Azure platform can get AUTOMATED DISTRIBUTION across domains and boundaries. Forget system integration issues and SOA spaghetti. Modular enterprise applications can be installed directly – Azure will handle integration through standardized connectors.

Microsoft is not the only major player building in this direction. VMWare seems to have similar ambitions when they cleverly integrate their Spring Source Java framework with Force.com (Salesforce) and Google App Engine. So it looks as we may end up with two dominant directions in enterprise platform technology stacks – Microsoft with .Net and VMWare with Java.

But wait, these are programming languages – what has that got to do with enterprise software? Enterprise software is Oracle and SAP and Microsoft Dynamics, right? It is today, but not necessarily tomorrow. I’ll save that discussion for a later post though …