Microsoft investing heavily in cloud research

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Signaling the enormous role technology companies see cloud computing playing going forward, Microsoft will reportedly spend 90 percent of its research budget on the cloud this year.

According to a Bloomberg report, Microsoft international president Jean-Philippe Courtois recently told the news provider that its $9.6 billion research and development budget will be heavily geared toward cloud computing.

The software giant has increased its focus on cloud computing drastically in recent years, rolling out new cloud-based services, such as the Windows Azure platform, Windows Server Hyper-V and the Office 365 productivity suite. Now, with this most recent investment, Microsoft is evidently planning to take its cloud services to new levels.

According to Bloomberg, Courtois said Microsoft's global growth has been healthy and balanced, but has been particularly fast in emerging markets. As these markets continue to mature and businesses adopt more cloud computing solutions, Microsoft would undoubtedly prefer to be the go-to services provider.

While the company hasn't specified which areas of the cloud it plans to research, Microsoft's Rik Fairlie recently wrote for Forbes that there are several issues that need to be addressed to help the technology mature. These issues include governance, organization among cloud environments and partnerships between vendor and customer.