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Microsoft to take on government cloud in china

23rd August 2011

Microsoft Corp has announced it will move to a new operating system, in a bid to tackle the Chinese cloud computing market. The software giant has signed an agreement with China Standard Software (CS2C) to run its specialist NeoKylin Linux Server, thought to be favoured by a number of Chinese government agencies, on Hyper-V Open Cloud architecture. The move will be Microsoft’s first into what is considered a potentially huge cloud market in China.

Confirmed in a press release announcement early this morning, the new partnership will see Microsoft make use of CS2C’s Linux operating system, NeoKylin, a product already approved by several Chinese Government ministries.

“The primary goal of this agreement is to provide public and private cloud solutions to a diverse array of industries through a rich partner ecosystem,” the press release stated.

“The mixed source solutions stemming from this collaboration will be built on Microsoft’s Hyper-V Open Cloud architecture and will include support to run CS2C NeoKylin Linux Server products. While establishing market and technology collaboration, the two companies have also signed a mutually beneficial customer legal covenant agreement.”

Microsoft and CS2C will now jointly sponsor a virtual technology lab in Beijing for “solution development and testing of cloud solutions that allow customers to move to virtualization and a cloud-based IT infrastructure.”

The lab will focus on the certification of CS2C NeoKylin Operating System on Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V, creating Microsoft Systems Center management packs for CS2C NeoKylin Operating System application workloads, and incorporating support for CS2C NeoKylin Operating System within the Hyper-V Cloud architecture.

At an event announcing the partnership yesterday evening (US), Sandy Gupta, General Manager of Open Source Solutions Group at Microsoft, added the potential market in China could include government entities such as the Beijing city government and the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, who have both indicated a desired move to cloud computing to help cut IT budgets.

“From the perspective of users, we are glad to see cooperation between different operating system providers,” Fu Boning, Information Center Deputy Director for the China Ministry of Agriculture, later stated.

“The cross-platform collaboration of multiple platforms is becoming a trend in areas like cloud computing. With more and more collaboration from vendors, the customers’ entire information system will be better protected.”

Many IT market forecasters are in agreement that cloud computing in China is expected to boom in the coming 12 months. The cloud applications market is already expected to be worth over £5bn by 2012, according to figures published by CCID Consulting, while Gartner recently confirmed that 55% of Chinese businesses were in a position to spend up to 10% of their IT budgets on cloud.

With so much demand for cloud on the horizon, the Cloud Computing World Series will stop in Hong Kong on 30th November and 1st December, with many of the world’s top cloud vendors and buyers expected to be in attendance.