Like VMware, Microsoft looks to a hard and fast of partners to construct out Azure-compatible cloud services and offer them on a regional basis.

Microsoft has began to build a global chain of Azure datacenters, with two in Europe, five in Asia, and 3 within the US. Now it’s partnering with 25 third parties to assist fill in one of the most gaps.

Microsoft is equipping these third parties its Cloud OS Network with the newest Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager, Operations Manager, and Azure Pack, which might be Azure cloud functions running on Windows Server. The partners are launching their very own Azure-like cloud services.

In many cases, Microsoft is partnering with a regional merchant, allowing a eu company to maintain its citizens’ data inside its own boundaries. One example is TeleComputing in Oslo, Norway, which has two datacenters in that country and two more in Sweden.

In other cases, Microsoft is partnering with companies that have already got substantial cloud operations, including CSC (formerly Computer Sciences Corp.) in Falls Church, Va., which has rapidly built up its presence as a cloud vendor on infrastructure built on VCE’s Vblocks converged network and compute server racks. VCE is a subsidiary of EMC and Cisco, with VMware as an investor. Vblocks include VMware’s vSphere already installed.

As an indication of ways much things can be changing, both CSC and TeleComputing have up in the past been primarily hosting workloads in line with VMware’s ESX Server. Both are actually adding a more Microsoft-oriented set of shoppers. TeleComputing is definitely converting its own infrastructure far from VMware right into a more Azure-like environment. This will run on a mix of Windows Server 2012, System Center 2012, Hyper-V, and Azure Pack for System Center.

[Are looking to learn more about how Microsoft seeks to spread using an Azure-like environment? See Microsoft Charges Into Enterprise Cloud Market.]

CSC, however, gained a multi-hypervisor capability when it acquired ServiceMesh in November. CSC is the lesser known of only two occupants of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant as a number one public cloud supplier. The opposite, as you could have guessed, is Amazon Web Services. CSC can be built on VMware-equipped Vblocks, but its trying to find Microsoft-based customers.

Many companies which are heavy users of Microsoft’s Hyper-V are searhing for a cloud supplier to start out them at the route to the cloud, said Eugene Saburi, Microsoft’s general manager of channel marketing for Cloud and Enterprise. Sometimes they’d prefer a firm of their backyard that may help them with the main points, in preference to a remote Azure datacenter in San Antonio or Chicago. At times, they need to determine a personal cloud but in a well-managed external datacenter. Microsoft’s Cloud OS Network is good for that, he said.

In Europe, the regional suppliers can assure Hyper-V users that their data will remain inside national boundaries, as required in Germany, France, and the united kingdom, he added.

With the launch of the Cloud OS Network, Microsoft is moving from being “an organization selling Azure services to an organization selling the theory of Azure because the cloud system of choice. I’d expect this initiative to be rolled out further and, over the following couple of months, see the messaging of Azure more strongly centered at the Cloud Operating System theme,” wrote Ben Kepes, a cloud consultant in New Zealand, on Forbes Business Insider Thursday.

With its auxiliary network of providers, Microsoft just isn’t emulating the Amazon example. Amazon’s EC2 cloud is usually in response to a handful of information centers in all the major regions of the arena. Rather, it looks more like VMware’s strategy. Over the past three years, VMware began extending its reach with dozens, then hundreds, of regional service providers. It operates a handful of its own vCloud Hybrid Service data centers in addition.

TeleComputing CTO Kjell-Toe Espeseth, in a phone interview from Norway, said his firm runs 10,000 servers in four data centers in Norway and Sweden. Before Cloud OS Network have been announced, he began moving customer workloads from running under VMware ESX Server and vSphere to Hyper-V to minimize his choice of VMware licenses.

For Espeseth’s purposes, Microsoft has caught as much as VMware enough to permit him to produce IaaS service according to System Center’s Virtual Machine Manager, Operations Manager, and the Azure Pack for Windows Server. “VMware costs significantly more. Microsoft licensing is a small fraction of VMware. We’re going to move strongly towards Windows Server and Azure Pack,” he noted.

TeleComputing may have no problem continuing to receive ESX Server workloads but will convert them into Hyper-V compatible workloads and run them. He uses Vision Solutions Double-Take to do the conversions.

TeleComputing’s data center conversion fits in with a bigger conversion occurring in its customer base. It was once an IT services company; it must become more of a commodity infrastructure company, which amounts to “decomposing a number of our former services into more of a pure infrastructure as a service company,” Espeseth said.

IT services remain the most important a part of TeleComputing’s business, but Espeseth says the shift to more basic IaaS services is already underway. Establishing commodity infrastructure with the bottom possible hourly rates “is a major competitive advantage,” he said.

Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek, having joined the publication in 2003. He’s the previous editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld and previous technology editor of Interactive Week.

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