Microsoft continues to expand the reach of its Azure services by introducing new capabilities, seemingly on a daily basis. Today I was surprised to see an announcement for the new Azure Machine Learning service (more background in this NY Times article). The link for the service apparently isn’t live yet, though.
The availability of this service raises some interesting questions around Office Graph, the set of nifty social-ish features that Microsoft introduced at SPC and reiterated at MEC and TechEd. We recently learned that, at least for now, there are no plans to offer Office Graph, and its associated features, to on-premises customers in the next release of Exchange Server. Carefully parse that statement; it could mean anything from “there will never be Office Graph features in on-prem Exchange” to “we can change our plans and include them at any time.”
It’s fair to say that Office Graph is designed to leverage the high scale of Office 365, and that because it is a resource-intesive group of processes and services, that there’s likely to be a lot of infrastructure for management, monitoring, and tuning of its components— not necessarily something that could trivially be unleashed on the existing base of on-premises customers. I’d bet that these services have a lot of interconnections, too. However, if Microsoft is adopting the Amazon approach of “everything is a service”, as they seem to be, you’d think that having some parts of Office Graph running on Azure ML is not only possible but probable. And the Azure folks are clearly comfortable with hybrid environments, as witness the fact that the Forza 5 and Titanfall video games on Xbox One both make extensive use of Azure-based resources.
So, if Office Graph is (or could be) consuming Azure ML as a service, it would seem to lower the barrier for getting Office Graph-related services into on-prem Exchange. I’ll be watching closely to see what Microsoft announces, and even more closely to see what they do, around this issue— it seems like the best possible world would be one where on-prem customers can harness the scale of Azure to get access to Office Graph features and where Microsoft doesn’t have to engineer a complete support system around on-prem variants of the Office Graph components. Stay tuned…
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