Office + Rackspace…..ticking the `Microsoft’ box?

The recent announcement by Rackspace that it has launched a new business unit – Cloud Office at Rackspace – in collaboration with Microsoft can be interpreted a couple of different ways. And depending on what comes out of Microsoft next month in terms of CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote presentation to its Future Decoded event at London’s ExCel Centre, those different ways may in fact be quite complementary.

The arrival of Cloud Office unit at Rackspace is, in many ways, not a dramatically revolutionary step. The company is offering users the chance to build out Office-based business services on the back of hosted Microsoft Exchange and Rackspace email services, Microsoft’s Lync and SharePoint collaboration tools and the Jungle Disk back up service.

These are, of course, all services that Rackspace has had available as `product entities’ for some time, and the one difference now is that its Fanatical Support service has now been extended to encompass increasing levels of consultancy capabilities. This represents a subtle but important change towards taking on the engineering of services for clients from the start, rather than the classic support model of picking up the pieces once the user’s own attempts at self-engineering have unequivocally expired.

So at one level this move can be seen as just a marketing exercise, packaging up what is already available into a more readily understood and digestible entity for potential customers. There is nothing wrong with that, of course, but it does beg a couple of questions of its own.

Does it mean, for example, that the price wars starting to build up in the datacentre infrastructure business – the selling of brute compute time – is starting to get painful? It would not surprise me if this is a component in the mix for Rackspace, though on its own it might prove to be a bit risky as a source of new business because it could be seen as trying to eat the lunch of some of its customers, such as specialist service providers already providing cloud services based around Microsoft Office 365.

Microsoft already has many partners – such as BrightStarr, Appura, and Carrenza to name just three – servicing the Office-oriented Microsoft cloud service market already. Rackspace will have to go some to compete on service capabilities and expertise, when up against specialists that have niche track records.

The other possibility, however, can be surmised from the fact the early responses to the previews of Microsoft Windows 10 are looking good. Add to that the fact that with its rebranding of Nokia mobiles under the Lumia tag, Microsoft would certainly seem to be showing every sign of being seriously committed to its future as a core part of an overall plan.

My last blog set out my thoughts on the possibilities that might stem from a combination of Windows 10, soup-to-nuts common software infrastructure from mobile front-ends, through the delivery of Office applications in the cloud, other applications servers and on to back-end, back office applications servers. The potential to give often very `small-c’ conservative users that have been deeply committed to Office for years a route out of their commitments to old on-premise Windows platforms and onto the cloud, could represent a big potential market that could tick a lot of boxes for them.

And let us not forget that there is also Microsoft Dynamics, which can ERP, CRM and other serious back-office tools into this mix. A cloudy-Office front end could give those tools a significant bit of synergistic leverage into the cloud marketplace.

So does it follow that this new development from Rackspace, packaging up mostly existing offerings into more of an obvious meal rather than a bunch of ingredients, that service providers are being persuaded Microsoft might just be about to get it right? It is certainly possible, and it would certainly make for a synergistic marketplace.

Literally millions of user businesses would have a way forward into far more flexible and agile operations without having to abandon the existing processes, operating methods and staff skill sets that they have built up over the years…..well, at least not until they feel ready to do so. Microsoft gets to keep its incredibly strong hold on the heartland of day-to-day business operations, and the service providers get a wide range of entry points into the market – from providing an optimised set of core hardware and software resources for specialist service aggregators through to becoming frontline full service operations in their own right.

To add a touch more grist to this mill, news has arrived that Microsoft is announcing at its current TechEd conference in Barcelona a number of developments that point in this general direction. For example, there is now to general availability of Office 365 APIs for mail, files, calendar and contacts. These should allow developers to aggregate applications together to build more comprehensive services out of known and understood entities.

Also by early next year the company will roll out built-in MDM capabilities for Office 365. These will  allow organisations to manage data across a range of phones and tablets, including iOS and Android devices. Furthermore, Intune will soon offer application wrapping for customers’ line-of-business apps and new mobile apps for securely viewing content.

So, the groundswell underneath a possible resurgence of Microsoft as a major cloud services player (as opposed to just a vendor of `cool cloud technologies’) may just be really starting to move. If this is not what Nadella talks about in London in two weeks’ time, then it may be time for business users to seriously look elsewhere…….with some urgency.