Microsoft to Boost Azure with GreenButton Acquisition

Microsoft (MSFT) has made another acquisition that is intended to give a boost to the capabilities of its Azure public cloud offering. The company has acquired New Zealand-based GreenButton, a “provider of integrated on-demand solutions that allow customers to manage compute-intensive workloads in the cloud.”

As Mike Neil, general manager of Azure at Microsoft, wrote in a blog, GreenButton’s technology was designed to be easy to use and enables organizations to quickly cloud-enable applications without the need to recode existing software.

“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 wrote. “Our work integrating GreenButton’s leading technology with the enterprise-grade scale and global reach of Azure starts today, as we welcome the New Zealand-based team to the Azure family. As a result, the existing GreenButton service will no longer be available to new customers. We look forward to launching a new service integrated in Azure later in the year.”

Neil wasn’t more specific about when or exactly what the GreenButton-based Azure offerings will be, but it seems likely Microsoft will work to put together solutions to compete with cloud-based high-performance computing offerings from its major competitors.

And the acquisition may also help Microsoft in its ongoing question to conquer various vertical industries. Neil noted in his blog the science, engineering, media and finance industries as just a few verticals that are realizing what is possible with “incredible computing power” combined with Big Data.

“But for each of these scenarios, these customers need help processing massive amounts of information and running compute-intensive simulations, so they can more simply and easily realize what is possible,” Neil wrote.