UK Windows Azure User Group
Registration is open in London for our upcoming talks:
- June Seats left: 74
And also in Manchester:
- June Seats left: 32
- July Seats left: 36
The capacity of these events is 75/40 seats respectively. Please register now to avoid disappointment.
Startups and Windows Azure was a welcome change in pace for us during the month of May. We've already blogged about it here. We had a reasonably good turnout of about 65 people who came to listen to Bindi Karia from the Bizspark team in the UK and Mark Bower, the CTO of Cube Social, a Windows Azure startup that has made a large footprint already with their flagship app used to connect businesses through social media.
By welcome change, I really mean inspiring. We've had conversations with Microsoft in the past about Enterprise adoption of Azure and there are mixed feelings about what is achievable especially given that many of the larger organisation can build their own cloud if they choose to. This has always brought us back to the conversation that the best target market for Windows Azure is a startup business that can use the cloud reliably to grow and scale up.
Bizspark offers 2 small role instances, storage and a 5GB SQL Azure instance to any startup that qualifies. This is enough to get anybody started with an idea. Who else does that?! Possibly google do it to an extent and offer a nurture program and some incubation but not to the extent that Microsoft do. If each 3-year startup costs MS ~$4-5K in hosting fees then in the UK alone they are supporting the startup scene to the tune of $12 million upwards. On a global scale this becomes several hundred million per year. My only grievance is that whilst there are several startups that truly deserve this I know of a lot of fulltime freeloaders who sign up may tie up the resources (of which there are a natural limit on this obviously!). My only gripe therefore with Bizspark is to ensure that the screening mechanism is sufficiently advanced to support real business endeavours and not just pseudo-startups.
Since we've already blogged about this we won't air our thoughts again suffice it to say that the meeting was great and we thank the speakers for their valuable time. The open forum at the end worked really well and different people brought up different problems in different ways that they were having with the platform. It worked so well in fact that we decided to cancel the next months meeting on the open source stack and set up an open forum with an invited panel to answer questions and have a general debate on all things Azure. We felt that this was the best course of action as a prelude to the summer conference.
As a group we're non-profit making but always on the lookout for sponsors. If you would like to sponsor an event please contact Andy Cross
