Microsoft Azure Stack To Launch Mid 2017 Dell And Hpe Onboard

Microsoft is preparing to launch its Azure Stack by the middle of 2017. Furthermore, it will come in appliance form with a few vendors onboard. Dell, Lenovo, and HPE are signed on right now, with Lenovo on the fence until 2017. We’re not certain of others who might follow.

Mike Neil, corporate vice president for Enterprise Cloud, made the announcement in a blog post earlier, stating the decision to launch Azure Stack in 2017 was made after several months of feedback. It showed that customers prefer to have an Azure that is fast and responsive instead of installing and configuring Azure all by themselves.

“To best meet these requirements, we will prioritize delivering Azure Stack as turnkey integrated systems in the initial general availability (GA) release, combining software, hardware, support and services in one solution,” Neil says. “As we do this, we will leverage our deep experience in both cloud and enterprise datacenter environments to optimize the customer experience”.

Here’s what Lenovo had to say about its partnership with Microsoft and about the Azure Stack:

“Lenovo and Microsoft share a common vision related to the customer value of hybrid cloud”, according to Brian Connors, vice president of Next Generation IT and Business Development at Lenovo. “This experience and vision, coupled with the converged co-engineering work we are doing with Microsoft, is well suited to bring an Azure Stack integrated system solution to market where we can simplify deployments for our customers”.

We’re interested in seeing how well this turns out for the software giant and how many hardware makers will decide to get on the bandwagon.

Microsoft is currently offering customers a free 1-year Azure upgrade. Furthermore, the software giant has made FreeBSD 10.3 available as a ready-made VM image in the Azure Marketplace.