Microsoft makes a small acquisition to help it catch Amazon's cloud

When Steve Ballmer CEO of Microsoft was, he had a good part of the scene in a conference wearing a sweaty shirt and shouting a word repeated: developers!

Ballmer's 14-year reign at the head of the software company was completed three years ago, in part because developers were going anywhere except Microsoft.

If Apple and Android to create mobile applications, Amazon Web Services run and test websites, or open source technology easier to implement and customize, many programmers have avoided the old Microsoft Developer platforms for bright toys elsewhere.

Since replacing Ballmer as CEO in early 2014, Satya Nadella has made it one of its primary goals to bring developers. His latest move came on Monday with the acquisition of Deis, an open source tool that allows developers to create, run and move applications between local computers and clouds from different Microsoft vendors. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.


Of Microsoft Azure Cloud is a second away for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Nadella is competing to gain a greater market share as companies quickly move the workloads from their own data centers to the cloud. The promotion of emerging open source projects is essential to win business from developers who want the widest possible range of software and platforms.

"With all the open source projects that plague developers, you should have the bids to respond to this option if you want to attract your cloud," said John Vrionis, partner at Venture Capital in Silicon Valley Lightspeed Venture Partners and a Enterprise software inverter. "If the developers start at AWS and meet, they do not come to think about Azure."

Microsoft recently began working with Databricks to integrate integration tools and start analyzing data in Azure. Databricks, one of the few companies marketing the open source Apache framework, has so far worked at AWS. And at the end of last year, Microsoft has made the astounding decision to join the Linux Foundation as a platinum member, publicly supporting the open source platform that has always competed with Microsoft's flagship Windows operating system.

This new emphasis on openness is not limited to Azure. One year ago, Microsoft spent $ 500 million on a company called Xamarin, whose software helps developers build applications on all major mobile platforms, namely iOS and Android.

Cloud is the great battle. This is where Microsoft Windows servers, which play an important role in the data centers of many companies, are thrown when companies unload their infrastructure. By the end of 2016, AWS controls 40 percent of the infrastructure market in the cloud, while the next three players - Microsoft, Google and IBM - accounted for 23 percent, according to Synergy Research Group.


The acquisition of Deis Microsoft pushes more deeply into the red packaging market. Containers allow developers to create code in a virtual box to be shared or moved between applications and the cloud easily. Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft's cloud group, called containers "the new currency in the cloud."

"At Microsoft, we've seen both explosive growth at once interesting and the deployment of container workloads on Azure, and we're committed to ensuring that Azure is the best place to run," Guthrie said in a blog entry on Monday .

Deis is proclaimed as "making Kubernetes easy to use." Kubernetes is an open source technology container developed by Google to deploy and scale applications. Microsoft bought Deis from Engine Yard, a company whose software is designed to make applications run smoothly in the cloud.