After the public-cloud hype, many companies found themselves locked in to a number of service licenses provided by cloud vendors. These same companies also depended on their existing servers, virtual machines and other legacy equipment, resulting in a hybrid multicloud ecosystem.

In fact, 80% of their workloads are still on-premises with just 20% in the cloud, according to Patrick Moorhead (pictured), founder and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

Looking at this from the angle of opportunity, Microsoft Corp. began working behind the curtains a few years ago to provide a cloud-native control plane — Azure Stack — to manage and enforce policies for these companies with information technology resources wherever they are, according to Moorhead. The platform ensured that the Azure ecosystem could be used in these disjointed, hybrid environments.

The newly announced Azure Arc takes things a step forward to afford organizations a single pane of glass for managing hybrid, multicloud and edge computing. 

“Microsoft already had a full stack, i.e. Azure Stack, but [Arc] takes it up a notch, because you can deploy Arc anywhere on anybody’s cloud,” according to Moorhead. “And I think to be a credible player you have to have both implementations — going one way and gong the other, being able to work with other people’s clouds. If you want to go all-in on Microsoft, you have Arc.”

Moorhead spoke with Stu Miniman and Rebecca Knight, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Microsoft Ignite event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed hybrid computing, Microsoft’s Azure Arc and Power Platform, and trust in the Microsoft ecosystem (see the full interview with transcript here). Answers have been edited for clarity.

Miniman: Microsoft has changed. Is it a trusted partner for companies building their IT strategy?

Moorhead: I have to say based on the last … five years, the level of Microsoft trust has raised. And there are other players who made Microsoft look like the super trust zone. I do believe, particularly, since Satya [Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive] has been here, the level of trust has gone up. And I hear from clients that I meet with all the time, other people are on the naughty list for sure, even those … companies who haven’t, let’s say, done something that’s horrible, but it’s just the notion that something could go wrong. Enterprises, they’re slow to adopt; they’re very conservative.

Knight: One of the things that is getting a lot of attention is Azure Arc. Nadella himself said, “This marks the beginning of hybrid computing.” What are your first impressions of it, and are you able to see the immediate differences between Stack and Arc? 

Moorhead: Microsoft already had a full stack, i.e. Azure Stack, but this takes it up a notch because you can deploy Arc anywhere on anybody’s cloud. They even showed a demo of doing backups to AWS … and I’m sure they’re going to show it running on Google Cloud Platform as well. 

Miniman: The announcements this week were compelling, but it made me rethink — we’ve been talking about hybrid cloud for a number of years, but we’re not really there. Arc, it’s the first piece; it’s only in tech preview. How is Microsoft doing today at delivering what customers need … and moving forward on their cloud journey? 

Moorhead: They were doing hybrid before it was cool. And it was interesting; for about two years when they were rolling it out or building it, they weren’t talking about it. So I was thinking … is it not catching on? Or do they want to put more on the big cloud, Azure? But, in fact, they had been diligently working behind the scenes. They were actively building out their hybrid opportunities.

And I do believe that when it comes to the slice of hybrid, they are leading right now. It depends on where you start; they’re leading if they have a major public cloud.

Miniman: I looked at Anthos and said, “In Google Cloud or in my data center, sure.” But Anthos on AWS? So, the same question for Microsoft is, if I’m in AWS and have a big footprint of AWS, is [Arc] going to fly?

Moorhead: The reality is, in a Fortune 500, you’re going to have multiple panes of glass. You just need to determine which two or which three are you comfortable with. Maybe you’ll have a pane of glass for deployment. Maybe you’ll have a pane of glass for ops.

The interesting thing that I’m really looking for, though, is where this heads with multicloud. Because I believe, at least in my definition, multicloud is kind of fiction if you talk about actually managing it. Because DevOps are cool, but you know when you go to multicloud you break dev and you break ops. So … [with Microsoft] if you buy into their dev and their ops and their security, you would go all-in on Arc. 

Here’s the complete interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Microsoft Ignite:

Photo: SiliconANGLE