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Microsoft Increases Roadmap Clarity For Its Cloud Customers

This article is more than 9 years old.

One thing I've heard time and again from customers of cloud vendors is that they wish there were some more visibility into the vendor's roadmap. There's nothing that annoys an IT leader more than investing lots of time and money into building a piece of functionality, only to have it introduced as a product their vendor sells a week or two later.

The flip side of this is that cloud vendors work in an ultra competitive space and are running as hard as they can to build functionality. Missed deadlines, loss of flexibility and tighter constraints are all a flip side of being more public about their roadmap.

It is an area of tension and not all of that tension can be resolved. Microsoft however are moving themselves along the continuum and are today launching a website to detail their cloud platform roadmap.

The site is intended to build a comprehensive view into the coming improvements and developments in he broader Microsoft cloud platform business. The roadmap covers cloud services like Microsoft Azure, Intune, Power BI, and Visual Studio Online; server offerings such as Windows Server, System Center, SQL Server and Visual Studio; and converged system appliance offerings such as Cloud Platform System, Analytics Platform System and StorSimple.

It is an awesome resource to help IT organizations plan for their own futures - and decide what to build, and what to hold off building with the knowledge that they'll be able to buy it in the future. It is also a site for Microsoft to showcase its most recent product launches.

This reflects a light directly back at Microsoft's Seattle neighbor Amazon. Amazon's own cloud platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is notoriously cagey about publishing a roadmap. Indeed it has only been in the past year or so that the company has opened up at all to industry analysts - whether AWS will feel that it needs to react to this Microsoft move and be more public about its roadmap remains to be seen - I'd suggest that would take a fairly big cultural shift within Amazon.

It's great to see Microsoft doing this - it's a very positive step.

 

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