Ballmer, Tucci Discuss Microsoft, EMC Cloud Vision

CIO - Microsoft and EMC converged in New York City on Tuesday to announce a three-year extension of their alliance to work together on enterprise virtualization, storage, security and content management products.

The two tech giants are pushing the use of server and storage virtualization as a way for cash-strapped IT departments to better integrate technologies and save money. One major area of interest for both companies is cloud computing, in which computing tasks are assigned to connections, software and services over the Web.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and EMC CEO Joe Tucci sat down with CIO.com's Shane O'Neill at the event to discuss the advantages and potential pitfalls of storing, securing and managing enterprise data in the cloud.

Here are their thoughts on how the cloud will complement today's data centers.

CIO.com: It seems cloud computing will take virtualization to the next level. I know it's early on in the cloud computing game, but how does the Microsoft-EMC collaboration to fit into both your cloud computing strategies?

Ballmer: There is no question for either one of us that the way both software and storage wind up constructed in the cloud will have different characteristics than what we have in the enterprise today.

I think the new solutions that get pioneered in the cloud will also get retrofitted so they can be run on-premises by customers, because no customer is going to have everything in the cloud. People are going to have these kinds of mixed environments.

One of the big areas of collaboration for us over the next couple of years is, as EMC pioneers what it's thinking about storage, and as we pioneer where we're going with products like SQL, Exchange and SharePoint for the cloud, the real onus on us is to bring that back together, both in the cloud and for customers in their data centers.

Tucci: At the heart of our partnership is the belief that the big winner will be what Steve and I call the hybrid model. It's where customers aren't forced to put everything in the cloud. We think it's a combination of putting applications in your own data center, and then use the cloud to take out peaks, or you could put specific things in the cloud. But customers want that option, for existing applications and for applications that they'll build in the future.

Ballmer: And there are some things they might not want to put in the cloud for security and reliability reasons. I don't think we're going to find the NSA [National Security Agency] putting a lot of stuff in the cloud the day after tomorrow. So, you've got to have these kinds of hybrid solutions.