» VIEW ALL POSTS Jul 11 2011   6:20PM GMT

Ballmer talks Hyper-V, cloud at WPC

Posted by: Colin Steele
cloud computing, Colin Steele, Hyper-V vs. VMware

LOS ANGELES — Hyper-V got a couple of quick shout-outs during this morning’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference keynote.

CEO Steve Ballmer cited Hyper-V’s role in Microsoft’s overall cloud strategy and alluded to the new features added in Service Pack 1 earlier this year.

“We’ve driven hard with new capabilities in Hyper-V,” he said.

Ballmer also said that VMware, Google, Oracle and other competitors offer some good pieces to the cloud puzzle, but that only Microsoft has everything.

“Having a strategy that spans public and private is really a unique strength for Microsoft,” he said.

That of course isn’t true when it comes to infrastructure, because VMware dominates in server virtualization/private cloud, and none of Microsoft’s public cloud offerings have really taken off. But I think Ballmer was also referring to Microsoft’s bread and butter: business applications such as Office, Exchange and SharePoint.

VMware is trying to compete more with these products through its acquisitions of Zimbra, Socialcast, etc., but Microsoft dominates this area — probably even more than VMware dominates virtualization. Here, the folks in Redmond do in fact have a “unique strength.”

The problem is, you need the infrastructure to take advantage of this strength in the cloud. And based on this morning’s keynote, which spent a lot more time on Bing, Xbox and Windows Phone than on Hyper-V, that isn’t one of Microsoft’s priorities.