Microsoft is partnering with HPE, Dell, and Lenovo to roll-out Azure Stack in mid-2017
Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet :
Context & Ripple Effects
This announcement caps a year of Microsoft stitching Azure into other companies' datacenters: Rackspace signed on to support public and hybrid Azure deployments back in 2015, and HPE followed that fall by making Azure its preferred cloud alternative. What changed now is that Microsoft stopped relying on service partners alone and recruited the three biggest x86 server makers — Dell, HPE, and Lenovo — to ship Azure Stack hardware directly.
The stakes are the same ones driving Dynamics 365's push onto Azure-hosted services: Microsoft wants enterprise workloads to stay inside its platform whether they run on-premises or in the cloud, and Azure Stack is the mechanism that makes 'Azure' a physical box rather than just a region.
First-order effects
- Dell, HPE, and Lenovo gain a differentiated enterprise server SKU — validated Azure Stack appliances — letting each sell a private instance of Azure rather than competing on commodity hardware specs.
- Enterprise customers locked out of moving certain workloads to public cloud get a supported path to run Azure-consistent infrastructure in their own datacenters, with Microsoft setting the hardware validation bar.
Second-order effects
- Service partners like Rackspace, which built its Microsoft relationship around supporting hybrid Azure deployments, shift toward managing and reselling Azure Stack capacity instead of building their own private-cloud stacks.
- HPE deepens a bet it already made when it named Azure its preferred cloud, while rivals without a Microsoft validation deal are pushed toward either matching the appliance model or ceding the hybrid-cloud server market.
Third-order effects
- If this holds, hyperscaler cloud platforms stop being pure datacenter businesses and become licensed software distributed through OEM channels — a structure that later shows up again in Microsoft, VMware, and Dell's joint IoT work on Dell Edge Gateways, extending the same partner-built pattern to the edge.
The trend: Cloud providers are turning their platforms into licensable, hardware-partner-distributed products so hybrid and edge infrastructure runs their software by default.