With GreenButton Acquisition, Microsoft Beefs Up Azure Cloud For High-Performance Computing Apps

Microsoft’s acquisition of New Zealand-based cloud management vendor GreenButton, unveiled Thursday, is a move that channel partners believe will boost the technical capabilities of the Azure cloud platform.

GreenButton, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network since 2011, develops technology that manages computationally intensive software running in the cloud.

When the technology is rolled into Azure later this year, Microsoft said it will empower high-performance, big data applications to run on virtual machines.

"Using GreenButton’s solutions, applications can be cloud-enabled quickly without recoding existing software – and without a PhD in computer science," Mike Neil, general manager of Microsoft Azure, said in a blog post Thursday.

’As a result of today’s acquisition, we’ll be working to integrate those solutions with the Microsoft Azure platform, enabling customers to simply and easily solve complex problems, get more from their data and drive their business forward,’ Neil said in the blog post.

GreenButton was founded in 2006 by some of the technical experts who built the high performance computing infrastructure for Director Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings trilogy, according to a report from Forbes.

But GreenButton's benefits extend far beyond providing the power to render movies, said Chris Hertz, CEO of New Signature, a Washington, D.C.-based Microsoft partner.

’One place where Azure is powerful is big data, big number crunching and big compute. [GreenButton] is a tool that enables companies to do big computation exercises using Azure,’ Hertz told CRN. ’Over time, Microsoft will take that technology and leverage it in new and powerful ways to democratize it, which will ultimately benefit my customers."

The GreenButton acquisition ’strengthens Azure’s positions and shows Microsoft is being really aggressive in the marketplace and picking up companies that are doing novel and interesting things,’ Hertz said, adding the deal makes sense given Microsoft’s recent talk about fostering a ’culture of data" internally.

Hertz also lauded Microsoft’s $15 billion of cloud-computing investments in the last year.

’They’re going out there and picking out companies and solutions where the goal is to make it easier for companies to access the amazing investments they’ve made in the cloud, and that’s what this acquisition is all about,’ Hertz told CRN.