Giving Our Customers More Choice with Windows Azure

Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success. – Henry Ford

Building a company is hard work. The kind of hard work that breaks your back, gives you nightmares and makes you wistfully dream for help. In my four plus years at Engine Yard, one lesson stands out more than anything else: you can’t do it alone. Success is based on your ability to build meaningful, mutually beneficial partnerships; first with your customers, followed closely with the most influential partners you can attract in your industry.

Engine Yard has been delivering cloud solutions for years. And during that time we’ve constantly delivered more choice, through new partnerships and internal development, as our customers have needed it. Choice in databases, choice in operating systems, in general, choice. Today we are happy to announce a new choice for infrastructure by announcing our partnership with Microsoft. Our growing customer base and our thriving partner ecosystem have requested more choice and flexibility and this is a major milestone in our extensive roadmap.

Why Windows Azure is the next IaaS platform for Engine Yard Cloud

Engine Yard is a well known open source champion. Our PaaS solution is open source based. Our engineers are regular contributors to open source projects, and we have sponsored countless events and projects. Many of our dev shop partners are influential open source leaders, and we actively look to incorporate their new projects into our core offering. This keeps us on the cutting edge and allows us to deliver flexible solutions to our customers. Open source is our secret sauce, so to speak. So why Windows Azure? Well, if you have followed Scott Guthrie’s blog for the past couple of years, Microsoft has radically changed its stance on open source. They do more than just embrace it; they are major contributors, sponsors and providers of open source solutions. We were delighted by their commitment to making Windows Azure an open solution and their vision of offering a cloud platform that is easy, open, flexible and most of all, enterprise ready. We believe that our developer community will be excited to use the Azure platform.

Through this partnership, customers will get the benefit of Engine Yard’s automation, orchestration and deep expertise combined with Windows Azure’s flexible infrastructure. Running together will make it easy for developers to build, migrate, deploy and manage open source applications, whether they are web, mobile or enterprise.

Partners & Partnering…find the best

So, with Microsoft added to our list of strategic alliances that include AWS, Oracle and Verizon, we find ourselves associated with some of the most influential partners in the cloud industry. Having these established partnerships for underlying infrastructure gives us the right architecture, so we can continue to deliver a world-class PaaS to our customers for years to come.

In addition, we will continue to focus on partnerships that are the lifeblood of our business: dev shops and digital agencies. We are constantly awed by the work of our developer partners, which is why we continually improve the quality of our world-class PaaS. Growing in synch with the open source community, particularly development frameworks like Ruby on Rails, we noticed early on that we were dealing with modern day Michelangelos. Digital agencies like Canvas, Area 17 and Webficient are true technology artisans motivated not by the next project, but by their desire to create something beautiful and functionally unique for their customers. Their projects are typically on the cutting edge, making use of the latest open source technologies, combined with astonishing creativity. Area 17’s The Webby Awards’ “People’s Voice” application, which received an average of 460,000 page views per day when voting was open or the Showtime Sports sites, built by Canvas, are great examples of this. These projects typically bring innovation to market, like Webficient’s use of crowdfunding for Dodge Dart cars, creating a new way for individuals to fund their car purchases. These are the types of partners we feel privileged to work with and that we want to build our business around. And we are now proud to call Microsoft that kind of partner.

To learn more about our partnership, I’d like to invite you to sign up for updates.