Microsoft Aggressive in the Cloud at Toronto Partner Conference

Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner said yesterday that the company would “respect everyone but fear no one” in going after competitors.

Microsoft will be competitively active in cloud computing, virtualization, security, mobile, workplace software and operating systems.

In the virtualization space, Turner shared IDC research showing that Microsoft’s virtualization software based on its Hyper-V hypervisor gained market share in the x86 segment in the first quarter of 2012.  Understand though that VMware still has double the share of Microsoft.

Microsoft is particularly targeting Google and Salesforce with its Microsoft’s Office 365 the cloud version of Office. Microsoft Dynamics customer relationship management (CRM) software in the cloud and Office 365 CRM now are presented as having more features and a lower per-seat cost than Salesforce.

Wrapping up his talk, Turner told partners to pitch the cloud agressively.  “I don’t want 1 thousand a month, I want 10,000, I want 30,000, I want 50,000 partners a month coming to the cloud,” said Turner. “Many of you haven’t made the shift. You gotta get on the cloud, if you’re not, because it is the future. It’s where the customer is going.”

For more insight on the show see: Microsoft prepares Windows Server 2012 for cloud. The article reports on how Microsoft has released a new set of technologies for hosting Azure-like cloud services.

Microsoft’s aggressive push this week will help accelerate cloud adoption rates.  A good thing for us all….