Ballmer "bets the company" on Azure

In a presentation given by Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer yesterday, he said he was "betting the company" on Azure.

This helps illustrate how serious the company is about tackling Amazon, Google and other cloud service vendors within this market.

The presentation, given at the University of Washington's Computer Science and Engineering Department, was entitled "The Cloud: Exciting New Possibilities ".

Ballmer also said Microsoft would significantly increase the number of people working on cloud-based and cloud-inspired systems.

"Some 70 percent of our people currently work on cloud platforms – this will rise to 90 percent by 2011," said Ballmer.

Even though Microsoft is investing significantly in cloud computing, Ballmer said the big cloud systems vendors such as itself, Amazon and Google could not roll out the whole cloud infrastructure between them.

He indicated that much of the infrastructure would come from private companies setting up their own clouds over the coming years.

He also explained that the public sector was likely to be a big cloud customer but that this would take time.

"There will be three versions of our Windows Azure platform, the public one, an [on-premise] customer one, and a government one," he said, but "it will take some time before governments are comfortable with data existing outside their jurisdiction."