LATAM CIO Summit
Prepared remarks by Jean-Philippe Courtois, President, Microsoft International
October 3, 2011 – Miami, Florida
Muchas gracias Alberto. Buenos dias! Estoy muy contento de estar aquí hoy para ayudar con el
inicio de la Cumbre de CIOs para América Latina! Espero que no les importe si me paso a inglés
para el resto de mis comentarios. Les aseguro que va a ser mucho más fluido!
We really appreciate you all being here with us for this important event. While I am going to
focus the majority of my remarks on the cloud, I’d like to start with a top-level overview of how
Microsoft looks at our business today and what we believe are the right focus areas going
forward. There are two big pieces here: software to services and devices. In 5 years or so, we
likely won’t think of ourselves as a software company. Of course we will still build software, but
we will think of ourselves as delivering the value of that software through services and devices.
We have two types of services: enterprise and consumer. You can see the split here of what
we’re really providing to whom. I won’t go into each one, but these are the big bets, if you will.
On the devices side, we think about how all of these services will light up all of the devices
people care about. Today, we are already in the device business – some we build like Xbox, and
others we have a core role in design. Phone is a great example where we designed the software
and provided specific guidance to Phone manufactures on the device specs. Participating in the
device design enables us to create the best experiences for people using the device as software
and hardware are fully integrated. We will continue to work with partners for both Phone and
PC to bring compelling and new devices to market that run Microsoft software.
But today I’m here to talk to you specifically about the cloud. I’m sure you’ve been hearing a lot
on this topic for some time now from many technology companies, but what I hope you’ll leave
this conference with is a very clear understanding of how Microsoft views the cloud across the
full spectrum of our business, and how we can work together to apply the cloud to your
business to help you meet your business goals.
What I hope you’ll understand is that we look at the cloud not as a one-size-fits-all solution, but
as a very flexible set of technologies and services that can be applied in a variety of ways, at
your pace. The cloud is undeniably a revolution in technology, but we believe it can be brought
about in an evolutionary way that ensures you and your organization can make the transition to
the cloud as seamlessly as possible.
We think about the cloud in two parts – the consumer cloud and the commercial cloud. We’ve
been in the consumer cloud business for 15 years, delivering consumer services like Hotmail,
Xbox Live, Bing and others for millions of consumers around the world.
The consumer cloud effectively began the trend toward consumerization of IT in the enterprise,
as people first began to expect “always-on access” to email from wherever they were. You’ll be
hearing a lot more about our approach to consumerization of IT throughout the next few days
so I won’t spend much time on this topic, but I’ll preview what’s to come for you by saying this:
The enterprise can realize a number of benefits from the consumerization of IT trend with the
right approach. The key is to strike a balance between user expectations and enterprise
requirements for security, privacy, control, and compliance.
So more to come on that, but what I want to stress is that our work on the consumer cloud over
these past 15 years has taught us a great deal about what it takes to operate cloud services
reliably and at massive, global scale.
And for the past five years, we’ve been retooling our full portfolio of enterprise technology,
including our most popular desktop products like Windows and Office as well as Windows
Server, Exchange, SharePoint and more, to enable our commercial customers to take full
advantage of the cloud.
We’re doing this because we believe deeply in the power of the cloud to drive dramatic
improvements for our customers and our partners. At Microsoft, our mission statement is to
help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential, and we believe the
cloud can be a true enabler of that. So we are 100% committed to helping each and every one
of you cloud-optimize your business by providing the deepest, broadest platform for you to be
able to build the cloud solution that works best for you, either on your own premises, or as a
private cloud with a local service provider, or in the public cloud in a Microsoft data center. We
are the only company which is positioned to provide you with this much choice.
We are committed to this because our big bold goal for the next decade and beyond is to
provide continuous cloud services for every business, every government and every individual on
the planet. This goal is the evolution of our founder Bill Gates’ original goal to put a PC on every
desk and in every home. At the time he outlined this goal, it seemed crazy, but at least in the
developed world, it is a reality today.
The cloud is the next big frontier – making it accessible to all. This will be no small effort,
considering that simple connectivity is still a problem in large parts of the world, but we believe
it can be done. To achieve that however, we are working harder than ever to partner with
governments, ISVs, solution providers, and an ever-wider ecosystem of players, to help ensure
that everyone can benefit from the cloud.
Importantly, we believe that the cloud represents an opportunity to drive national
competitiveness. I meet with many government leaders from countries all over the world, and I
can tell you that every single one cares deeply about this topic of improving their country’s
competitiveness.
The World Economic Forum tracks 110 indicators on the topic, falling into three main
categories. They are: Basic Requirements; Efficiency Enhancers; and Innovation and
Sophistication Factors. You can see some of these on the slide, and when tied in with a
country’s national priorities, the impact the cloud can make is remarkable. The Centre of
Economics and Business Research released a report that said cloud computing will add $1
trillion in productivity to the top economies over the next five years.
In Ireland, Microsoft recently commissioned a study that found if Ireland invested aggressively
in the cloud, it could eliminate $700,000 in cost each year from its economy, generate $12.9B in
sales annually for Irish based companies by 2014, create 8,600 new cloud-related jobs and
2,200 new non-IT SMEs leading to 11,000 more new jobs. It also found that the cloud could
lower the cost of delivery and improve the quality of public services in Ireland.
This is not technology for technology’s sake. We believe fundamentally that the cloud
represents an unprecedented opportunity for enabling people to DO more with and GET more
from their technology.
I have a couple of examples I want to share with you today to help illustrate these points, and
I’d like to frame the discussion with those three attributes of the cloud which we see as the
main drivers of its adoption: real-time access, scale and elasticity.
Let’s start with real-time access. The cloud puts the power of technology in the hands of the
masses, across devices, enabling better communication between individuals, between
businesses and their customers and employees, and also between governments and their
citizens.
In business, the biggest implications for this are with a group of people we call the “deskless
worker.” They are the postmen, the factory floor workers and the millions of other workers
who don’t sit at a desk. Getting something as simple as an email inbox for them to receive
messages used to be impossible, because where would they check it? Now with the cloud and
the broad array of smart devices or even kiosks, we can reach all these people with technology,
dramatically opening the possibilities for workers who previously had no way to benefit from
the power of technology.
This past June, we launched Office 365 in 40 markets around the world, with more markets on
the way. Office 365 is our cloud-enabled version of Microsoft Office and the reception so far
has been tremendous. There’s a new customer being added to Office 365 every 25 seconds!
One that is using our cloud productivity solution to provide real-time access to its deskless
workers is Codelco. This is a Chilean company which happens to be the world’s largest copper
mining company. It has 7,000 miners working underground and recently deployed this cloudbased solution to enable all 7,000 of those miners to have an email inbox.
What’s so interesting about this company is that it has actually set up cyber cafes underground
in the mines, as its miners are often down there for days at a time. These cyber cafes ensure
that the miners can get access not only to any important news from corporate headquarters
above ground, but also that they can communicate with their families while they are physically
separated. It’s a fantastic example of how the cloud is helping people both in a professional and
personal capacity stay connected in real-time to the information and the people that matter to
them.
The second attribute of the cloud that is driving its popularity and adoption is the ability to
achieve scale. This manifests in many ways, so I want to talk to you about 2 examples here. The
first is Boeing – the aircraft manufacturer. I’m going to let them tell you their story:
<VIDEO PLAYS>
In this case, the Boeing sales force is able to achieve scale in their sales efforts through the
cloud, using it to bring the airplanes to the potential customers, across devices and from any
location. A huge improvement!
While Codelco and Boeing are privately held, governments themselves are also harnessing the
power of the cloud. One example is SAT, the Mexican tax authority. This government entity has
deployed a public cloud solution to facilitate tax control and enforcement by implementing
electronic invoicing in Mexico. It was a massive undertaking by the government, and stands to
greatly benefit both Mexico’s citizens and the government itself.
This is another example of where SCALE through the cloud makes all the difference. In a
traditional on-premises solution, SAT would have had to initially set up redundant datacenters
and a huge amount of infrastructure to support the expected maximum capacity of the system.
With an expected capacity of at least 2 billion transactions per year, this would have been cost
prohibitive and inefficient. With the cloud, SAT was able to scale the solution dynamically as
demand grew, significantly streamlining the associated costs.
The final attribute of the cloud I want to talk about is elasticity, and to illustrate this, I’d like to
tell you about an Australian company called Computershare, which is the world’s largest
provider of investor-related technology services.
One of its main products is a technology platform that enables companies in Hong Kong that
are about to float on that stock exchange to manage online prospectus requests and receive
share applications. Computershare used to host this platform at its own data centres. However,
the large server capacity the platform required sat idle between floats, and bandwidth spikes
during the short float periods were enormous.
So Computershare decided to export this platform into the cloud with Windows Azure. The
move took six weeks and within a month, the platform was used to host investor enquiries for
one of Hong Kong’s biggest IPOs. The cloud-based platform-as-a-service easily accommodated
peaks in service demand and cost less than five per cent of the nominal costs of onsite hosting.
This is what I mean by elasticity – the cloud can provide anyone with access to massive and
entirely affordable computational power. With the public cloud, renting 1 machine for 1,000
hours will be equivalent to renting 1,000 machines for 1 hour, enabling us to rapidly and
affordably accomplish complex tasks that were previously impossible because of cost or time
constraints.
So these three principles – real-time access, scale and elasticity – are the fundamental drivers
of all the excitement that the cloud has been generating. They’re the reason that we’re
investing deeply in advancing the cloud. I want to put these investments in context a bit.
Looking at Microsoft’s R&D investments overall… we invest more than $9.5B in R&D per year,
which is $3 billion more than the next closest technology company, and more than any other
company in any industry in the world invests in R&D. We do that across 5 big areas: cloud,
consumer, search & display advertising, phones and opening up the Windows ecosystem.
Specifically to cloud, today, the majority of all of our developers are working on cloud services,
which make on-premises products better, and they certainly make our cloud services better.
This is our #1 area of investment that touches our full product and services portfolio and will
certainly be a multi-year journey, just as it will for our customers and partners.
We’re also investing in what we call Microsoft Technology Centers in multiple locations around
the world. These are physical centers of excellence where we invite customers and partners to
come and learn about the cloud, see demos, and work with our people to help them plan for
how they can take their business into the cloud. These centers exist today in Europe and Asia,
and are designed to help businesses of all sizes, governments and academics to experience
cloud technologies hands-on. We’re planning to open similar centers in Mexico and Brazil soon
which we hope will help accelerate cloud adoption in Latin America.
We’re investing in these regional centers of excellence because we know the cloud is still in its
earliest days, and what we’ve seen so far is only the beginning. There is so much potential in
the cloud, and we want to make sure as many people as possible can benefit from it.
The cloud will be an enabler in the evolution and revolution of technology toward natural user
interface including voice, touch and motion capture, the proliferation of RFID, machine
translation and more. It will enable governments to achieve massive efficiencies to better serve
their constituents, and it will effectively level the playing field for companies and organizations
of any size to compete on a global scale by removing the limits technology infrastructure
previously imposed.
The cloud will enable these things, but the real question is how quickly? For many, they will
start to use the cloud simply to help increase efficiency of existing operations, and improve
productivity in the course of usual business. This is a necessary and valuable first step, but what
I hope events like this do is help our industry first achieve that saved efficiency and productivity
and then… use the cloud to take their ideas beyond business as usual. To truly achieve
continuous cloud services for every person and every business on the planet, because THAT will
be a world in which we can all achieve the kinds of things we haven’t even dared to dream
about today.
Thank you for having me here today.