Microsoft enlists fat-piper Equinix to pump Office 365

Microsoft has turned to Equinix to deliver stable and reliable Office 365 services for enterprise customers. Equinix will deliver private, managed connections to Office 365 through its own servers in the third quarter of this year. Connections will come through something called the Azure ExpressRoute through Equinix Cloud …

[Steve Davies 3]

Too much Azure?

Azure this,

Azure that.

It seems to me that the 'Azure' brand is being attached to far too many things of dubious benefit.

Too much Blue methinks.

How long before MS becomes shirt sponsor at Chelsea or will the fat lady carry on singing the blues?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Too much Azure?

"It seems to me that the 'Azure' brand is being attached to far too many things of dubious benefit."

I can't think of anything that runs under the "Azure" brand that is not of clear benefit assuming you needed that type of service. Please outline which parts are dubious and why; and explain why so many senior IT decision makers are using them if so? According to Microsoft's and Amazon's latest results, Microsoft are about a billion $ a quarter ahead of Amazon in cloud revenue and the gap is growing rapidly...

Office 365 by the way isn't really sold under the Azure brand - although it does of course run on the Azure infrastructure.

[Henry Wertz 1]

Naming

"It seems to me that the 'Azure' brand is being attached to far too many things of dubious benefit."

(Not getting into the "dubious benefit".)

This is typical of Microsoft though. When .NET (the common runtime environment) was first released, they had planned to call their single sign-on service .NET, and had either released or planned to release Office .NET, Visual Studio .NET, Windows Server .NET, I think Exchange .NET... just off the top of my head. I think they were even planning to stick the ".NET" name onto DirectX somehow. Some marketing type at the company will decide to stick "name of the day" on all their products, later on they'll realize it's way the hell to confusing and stop. Apparently today the "name of the day" is Azure.

I have to admit, if hosted Office's performance characteristics make it tempting to get a dedicated connection to get decent performance, I'd probably instead conclude the performance isn't good enough and not use it rather than spend the big bucks on some direct line.

[Phil_Evans]

Lipstick on the pig

I don't remember reading the numerous outage 'the dog ate our homework' excuses put out as 'service updates' by MSFT that network infrastructure was in any way to blame for the bigger outages.

This is interesting but expensive flag waving that implies that we should take some assurance by Microsoft shoring up something they have no hand in (at least not now that they've outsourced it). If the network is so bomb-proof through this love in, then the room for excuses just got a bit smaller really.

I doubt whether Equinix will figure in SLAs for Azure other than 'the xxx team are working on it'. So a bit of a gun to the head if you ask me.

But nobody did. :-)