As I look forward into the future and beyond 2016, I have taken notice of what Microsoft is doing with Azure, and how they are positioning their products CRM, AX and others to leverage Azure services. Many people think Azure is nothing more than a private cloud or Rackspace and Amazon competitor. They couldn’t be more wrong.

A few weeks ago we hosted a AzureCon.com web event at our Tribridge Office’s in Tampa. In little over 1 hour, many people, included myself were blown away. Of course, at first thinking, this is not real, or how can I build a data warehousing infrastructure, setup azure machine language and get English like responses in less than 15 minutes. This had to be vapor ware right? WRONG.

After the video, which can be found here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/azurecon/, I immediately spun up an Azure free trial. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/ I proceeded to walk thru the steps I had recalled and replayed the video. In approx. 25 minutes I had exactly the same setup configured and running. Amazing.

This is truly the next generation of not only cloud, but a complete cloud application development platform, that simply cannot be competed against or ignored. Another example in the video above is Azure Auto scaling capabilities. We have all had that performance challenge at the end of the month processing, needing more bandwidth, or end of the quarter, or even holiday sales event, where the hardware solution purchased couldn’t keep up with the demand.

This is now no longer an issue. With Azure Auto scaling, Azure systems can scale to meet these demands and give you the extra horsepower needed. Pay for only what you need, when you need, not all year long. Truly this is very innovative. We are not talking about adding extra VM’s, web servers etc, this is actually scaling the size of the physical machine, for memory, bus, data, a complete virtual computer. Very neat indeed.

Over the next coming year, I will be working across both CRM and Azure Product Lines, and hope to provide the same level of experience on both platforms with posts that can help everyone. Time to study….