Microsoft doubles down on Azure with Cloud Adoption Framework
Some partners are retooling entire go-to-market strategy around new end-to-end cloud initiative
Microsoft is aiming to supercharge Azure uptake with the launch of a new framework that has been more than a year in the making.
The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) is designed to provide "One Microsoft voice for cloud adoption, consolidating and sharing best practices from Microsoft employees, partners, and customers".
"While the cloud offers tremendous flexibility in design choices, enterprises need a proven and consistent methodology for adopting cloud technologies," Microsoft stated.
"The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure meets that need, helping guide decisions throughout cloud adoption."
As of Q1 2019, Microsoft had bitten out a 17 per cent of the cloud infrastructure services market, according to Canalys, ahead of Google on eight per cent but trailing AWS on 32 per cent.
Not yet in general availability, CAF is Microsoft's attempt to help customers that have dabbled in Azure to go the whole hog, according to Dan Scarfe, UK founder of Microsoft Azure partner New Signature.
Scarfe said New Signature has been "heavily involved" in putting CAF together, adding that his firm has remoulded its entire go-to-market strategy around CAF.
"Microsoft has got a reasonable coverage of customers. CAF is about how you help those customers do more with Azure," he said.
"The approach up until now has been a bit piecemeal, with different parts of Microsoft and different partners doing different things with all of these point solutions. This end-to-end framework covers everything from first idea to workloads running in production. A whole team has been working on this for a year or so, and it's an impressive piece of work."
The prospect of CAF getting a big launch at next week's Microsoft Inspire adds yet more intrigue to the event following the shock news last week that the vendor is to withdraw internal usage rights from Gold and Silver partners.