The Future Trend of Microsoft and IBM

A year ago, IBM and many companies signed the "Open Cloud Computing Declaration," so was Microsoft's strong boycott; a year later, IBM also dropped more than 200 billion acquisitions for the development of cloud computing , And started to launch software to once again launch an offensive to the cloud computing market.

All IT companies have increased their concentration in the field of cloud computing. According to relevant data released by the relevant market research firm Gartner Inc., the global market for cloud computing in the last few years has reached 56.3 billion U.S. dollars, an increase of 21% over the previous years; IDC for information technology consulting estimates that, Cloud computing services will have up to one-third the growth in total IT spending by 2013; however, Merrill Lynch expects the worldwide cloud computing market to reach $ 95 billion in the next five years. In this area, the competition on the two giants IBM and Microsoft will also cause widespread concern.

Open cloud computing declaration: the first "standard" IBM lost to Microsoft

By the end of March 2009, dozens of vendors and organizations such as IBM, AMD, EMC, Sun, SAP, VMWare and other well-known chips, storage, virtualization and software in the industry initiated the "Open Cloud Computing Manifesto "and set out some principles for opening up cloud computing so as to ensure interoperability of cloud computing in the future.

However, the announcement was also boycotted by Microsoft, which launched the Azure platform, Amazon (Amazon), a well-known EC2 (elastic computing cloud), cloud computing pioneer Google Apps and Google Inc., the thriving Google Apps - these companies refused to sign declaration.

Industry analysts believe that those who require the development of standards manufacturers or organizations, signed the declaration is actually for their own benefit. They are lagging behind in the cloud computing competition, so use standards to make things easier for you to catch up. IBM and Microsoft, is the most direct opponent.

Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud computing initiative, released in 2008, aims to create an operating system that allows users greater flexibility when using Windows, allowing businesses to run certain programs on their own computer network, Microsoft can be entrusted with certain tasks in its large data center. Through Azure, Microsoft hopes to develop its own cloud computing market by virtue of its influence in the software field and industry as well as a large number of existing enterprise customers.

At the time, BusinessWeek commented that if Azure succeeds, Windows will undoubtedly become a "weapon" for Microsoft because many companies and consumers already know how to make and run Windows-based software, and Azure can boot They easily extend these software to the web.

So, IBM led the "Open Cloud Declaration" is undoubtedly a challenge for Microsoft Windows Azure. Given that the cloud computing market was still in its infancy, the industry believed that the most immediate aim of IBM was to use this declaration to dilute or delay Microsoft's move into the cloud computing market. This is the real goal.