AWS and Google have 'woken up to the hybrid reality' we knew all along, says Microsoft

While Oracle Cloud is just a "a small substantiation" brags Julia White

Microsoft has taken a poke at its rivals in the cloud space, alleging Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google have only just "woken up to the hybrid reality" of cloud while Oracle's new cloud ambitions are "a small substantiation" compared to the might of its own 34 regions.

The fighting talk came from Julia White, Microsoft's general manager of cloud platform, speaking at a press session in Atlanta yesterday evening, ahead of the first day of Microsoft's Ignite conference today.

Asked how Microsoft can differentiate itself from AWS and Google, White replied:

"I like to say that AWS and Google have to some extent woken up to the hybrid reality that we've known since the beginning, and it's really in our DNA.

"Whether it be Office 365 or Dynamics all the way down the stack, we have cloud as well as capability so people can run hybrid and move at their own pace, down into the infrastructure level, Azure Stack being maybe the best example of literally taking our Azure fabric and putting it in a smaller stamp for the customer to run it."

White accused "people in the industry" of "hybrid-washing".

"They mean hybrid as in, 'if I can connect my data centre with the cloud, connectivity is hybrid'. We don't believe that - we do consistency. Having that same experience with the same development APIs, the same great Office experience; not something that's between the two.

"And then having it across your entire enterprise estate. Hybrid isn't just an infrastructure statement, it's an overall enterprise estate."

Asked about Oracle, and that company's Amazon-baiting announcements at Oracle OpenWorld last week and its plans to ramp up its presence as a cloud vendor, White was similarly bullish:

"We've been doing this a lot longer, and we certainly have the scale of a global public cloud versus [Oracle's] small substantiation of cloud. We talk about our 34 regions. The way we're doing it, it's definitely differentiated."

White went on to explain how the Microsoft cloud story "isn't just about Azure Stack", which is yet to be released.

"Whether it's Exchange or SharePoint or Skype For Business, there's consistency up and down - Azure is one of many proof points of our commitment, and certainly not the only thing."

Keep an eye on Computing this week for more news and analysis from Microsoft Ignite. Follow our tweets on the ground by @petergothard.