Microsoft's CIO, Tony Scott, on Dogfooding at Microsoft

Some great bits and bytes I wanted to highlight in a CIO.com article published today featuring Tony Scott, Microsoft’s CIO and a video piece, where he talks about the benefits of trying out our own technologies and refining them before putting them into our customer’s hands. Tony also passes on some of the lessons we’ve learned as part of our trials to help other CIOs get started with their own cloud computing projects, how private cloud plays into the story, and other topics such as security.

While Microsoft is not only a leading technology developer, the company is also a big consumer of our own technology, including our cloud offerings like Windows Azure for example. This is something we call ‘dogfooding’ internally.

The story includes information on how Microsoft IT began moving some apps to Windows Azure two years ago, well before the public availability of the service. This includes projects such as the migration of Microsoft.com and our internal fund-raising for non-profit organizations tool which is part of our Giving Campaign. These applications really make sense for cloud computing scenarios given their fluctuation in traffic loads and for the Giving Campaign tool, the spike in activity the application sees during our annual campaign.

In this short three minute video, you can also see Tony comments on the lessons that we’ve learned while moving some of our apps to the cloud and the benefits we’re seeing from cloud computing.

I urge you to give the article a read and also check out the video.

For more information on what customers are doing and with Microsoft cloud computing technologies be sure to check out the Cloud Power site.

Thanks - larry