WPC beckons as Microsoft makes bold Azure cloud move

Microsoft is rolling out new storage services tied directly to Azure, ahead of the tech giant’s Worldwide Partner Conference next week.

As 40 of Microsoft’s Kiwi partners descend on Washington D.C. for the premier partner event of the year, Redmond has unveiled cloud-first storage and machine learning solutions, as well as new and expanded cloud services.

Kickstarting the releases with Microsoft Azure StorSimple, the company aims to offer a hybrid cloud storage solution that “dramatically cuts the cost and inefficiency out of managing a organisation’s ever-growing volume of data.”

“Available August 1, the new offering gives system integration partners great opportunity to help their customers deploy the solution for all types of storage,” writes Phil Sorgen, Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Partner Channel, Microsoft, via the company’s official blog.

“Azure StorSimple simplifies disaster recovery, consolidates management and brings on-premises data to the cloud for development and testing of new apps.

“As customers begin the move to cloud, storage is often the place they start, because the agility and cost benefits are so clear.”

Furthermore, the Azure Machine learning service, announced in June, will be available for preview during the conference, which allows partners to build advanced analytic cloud services for their customers quicker.

New cloud services…

According to Sorgen, over 8,000 customers and partners sign up for Azure every week, triggered by new services and capabilities.

In April, Microsoft introduced the Azure Preview Portal, a new cloud experience designed to simplify cloud development by bringing together cross-platform cloud technologies, services and tools into a single environment.

“On Monday, we’ll bring new IaaS functionality to the Portal, to allow users to easily manage virtual machines, as well as single-click SharePoint deployment for the management of multiple virtual machines within the Portal,” Sorgen adds.

WPC will also preview Azure Event Hubs, a new service that can broker millions of events per second, allowing partners and customers to pull in, process and analyse data from a nearly infinite number of cloud-connected smart devices.

“With WPC being only a few days away, I’m looking forward to meeting many of our partners and showcasing how Microsoft helps enable partners’ success in a mobile-first, cloud-first world,” Sorgen adds.

“As you can see from the announcements, cloud will continue to be a large part of WPC this year.

“The shift to cloud computing is a vast opportunity for our partners, and we’re focused on giving our channel the most comprehensive set of cloud technologies – spanning infrastructure, data, mobility, productivity and managed services – and the best programs and services to help them grow their businesses by building, hosting, managing or selling hybrid or cloud solutions.”

TechDay will be on the ground in Washington D.C. for the duration of WPC - so stay tuned for live updates through out next week.