Investing in competency building for Microsoft Azure and related technologies?

Question

A couple of questions around investing about competency building for Windows Azure.

• How glorious and revolutionary the platform is.
• How partners can add value to customers by using Azure.

Expanding a little further on my question, there are 2 players in enabling a cloud model for an application

• The hosting services provider (Microsoft)
• The application services provider (The rest of us)

My question is, what are the key value adds and sustainable competitive advantages that we, as application service providers, can take to market? Sustainable is the key word. What are the key advantages in investing in competency building for azure?

The entry barrier on Azure seems very low to me with my current understanding of the technology. Will it become like another .Net in just a few months with millions of players with nothing to distinguish one from the other?

What are the high technology content areas of azure to focus on, for a competency building exercise? Like share point services, live mesh etc?

Please share your views

Answer 1

One of the things that Azure gives is the ability to start a site that will scale as needed with very little up front capital expenditure.

Therefore, I think that focusing on building competency in how to build scalable Azure apps will be a profitable investment.

Answer 2

As an application services provider you should have an excellent understanding of the marketplace you're in, and as you're focusing on Azure you should have an excellent understanding of it's competitors and what differentiates them.

In other words what are the differences between Azure and other options, and why should your customers choose one over the other.

So I would be investigating similiar options that are available now, and building experience with those. This ranges from small Hosting providers to Amazon. (Someone was suggesting to me I host our SharePoint system with Amazon yesterday).

I would also be skilling up and gaining experience in the products Microsoft are focusing on, in particular SharePoint, Dynamics and SQL Server.