Previously I wrote about Apple’s Steve Jobs and the importance of great software. Now it’s time for antithesis; Ray Ozzie, who recently announced he was leaving the position he inherited from Bill Gates, that of Microsoft’s chief software visionary. When Ozzie joined Microsoft he released a memo setting out a bold strategy to turn the ship around and head to what he felt was the future, the Cloud. Now that Ozzie’s leaving Microsoft he’s penned another memo, this one frankly too long and near impenetrable, but just as forward thinking about where the software industry is going and how the Cloud is more integral to the future than ever.

Analytic Data Warehouses have also been moving lurchingly towards the cloud. For some vendors a Cloud strategy is simply running instances on Amazon’s EC3 service, (you know who you are – it gets dull always calling you out). For others it’s providing a hosted solution with remote access. Neither of these strike me as particularly valuable. In fact, they feel almost antiquated by today’s standards.

To me the Cloud is something much more vibrant and valuable, it’s something elastic that customers can scale up or down, with dynamic resource allocation ensuring efficient use of shared processing and storage resources. It’s something secure and offers protection for private data, and it’s something fully transparent to the end-user community.

SAND’s customers use our Cloud architecture to span continents and deliver advanced analytics to some of the largest companies in the world. We move hundreds of terabytes of data, tens of thousands of users, and the most complex queries imaginable running with high speed, linear scalability, and industry leading agility. We have data from disparate sources being brought together, enriched, and analyzed with 3 times the productivity and 7 times the performance of previous solutions, in a small footprint and with our patented infinite optimization that supports any question, any time, in real time. That’s because we make software and know how to do it. We see it as our job to make the best use of any CPU, any OS, and any disk configuration. We make it fast, we make it scalable, and we make it work.

Thanks in part to Ray Ozzie and his legacy, Microsoft is now all-in on the Cloud — or to borrow from Steve Martin, they are all-in-the-cloud-all-in-their-mind. In our mind it is our job to make the best software we can and allow our customers to use that in the manner that works best for them. Single instance, multi-instance, Extreme Data on mobile or on the biggest blade servers, in the Cloud, in a private cloud, wherever our customers want it, when they want it.