NetSuite's leap over to Azure cloud - a shot to the pills for AWS?

Is this the origin of the Salesforce rumours?

Is this perhaps the origin of the rumours that Microsoft was going to buy out Salesforce? Perhaps what Netsuite is really doing is positioning themselves for an acquisition by Microsoft. They may have an agreement that if they move to MS Azure and hit certain targets, then Microsoft will buy them at an agreed price.

It's certainly a viable end game to 17 years of no profits. Microsoft would buy a business like this, but Amazon won't. Microsoft on the other hand wouldn't touch them if they were still running on AWS.

Microsoft is already in the ERP/CRM business with MS Dynamics, which was formed from a couple of acquisitions. This buys them some more market share, and it's a company which is already cloud based, which fits in with Microsoft's business direction.

As for "why did they jump", well they haven't jumped yet. They just have a plan to jump. it will be interesting to see how well that plan goes in reality. A lot of people are nervous about "cloud" because they are afraid of vendor lock-in. If this move goes ahead and works well, some of that concern may be alleviated. On the other hand, it will also put other large customers in a better bargaining position than they are now since they would have a more credible threat to switch clouds.

I will bet however that what Netsuite will be paying Microsoft bears no resemblance to what you or I would pay. Microsoft may be paying them to host there, for all we know. It's like how Microsoft paid Nokia to use Windows Phone ("platform support payments"). Nokia sold the handset business to them after the payments ran out.

major risks for Netsuite?

Netsuite still exhibits the dysfunctional thinking that was present when the financial subscription service was owned by Oracle with Larry Ellison at the helm.

With other viable alternatives to Amazon AWS, Netsuite could have considered and chosen one of the far more robust, flexible and substantially more secure OpenStack based alternatives, from RackSpace for example, than Microsoft Azure, which makes many tchnologists wonder if this deal was the result of another "Microsoft will pay all costs" arranement that the company engaged in over the past several years, only to have paid for partner abandon Microsoft's services after disastrous experience, much like what happen in partnetship Microsoft had with the London Stock Exchange and credibly rumoured National Stock Exchange of India at Mumbai.

Projects financed by Microsoft at "their expense" prove that Free can be a disaster for the customer if world class, robust and secure technolog is not part of the equation.

That idea of Microsoft building a vast warehouse of data is wrong

Is anyone really considering the idea of hosting customer data and mining it? This is not a "you're the product" type of service, this is basically a variant of a hosting service were you hopefully pay only for what you use. But no one should be peeking at your customer records or transactions like they do with your free mailbox/timeline/pics.

Besides, the integration with AD may be a selling point for small and mid sized applications running in large corporations where AD is used as authentication backbone.