Microsoft will release Azure Stack in mid-2017
Microsoft has announced that its Azure Stack offering won’t be released before mid-2017. What’s more, it will come in appliance form, with just a few vendors -- so far only Dell, HPE and Lenovo -- being mentioned.
Announcing the news in a blog post, corporate vice president for Enterprise Cloud, Mike Neil, says the decision has been made following months of feedback gathering.
The feedback had shown that customers want a fast, and simple solution, instead of installing and configuring Azure Stack systems 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 explains. "As we do this, we will leverage our deep experience in both cloud and enterprise datacenter environments to optimize the customer experience".
So once Azure Stack is available, it will come as a prevalidated software from a select few partners. Dell and HPE are already on board, and Lenovo is expected to join the party next year.
"Lenovo and Microsoft share a common vision related to the customer value of hybrid cloud", says Brian Connors, vice president of Next Generation IT and Business Development at Lenovo, in a statement. "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".
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