Bob Muglia, vice president of Microsoft Corp.'s server and tools business, in a keynote speech this week at the vendors' Tech Ed 2010 conference in New Orleans, LA, told participants that central to customers meeting the challenge of cloud computing is reaching a balance between traditional, software-based, managed, server architectures and the power and scalability of cloud services driven by server warehouses, or some amalgam of the two.

Muglia said that Microsoft will deliver a platform that works across on-premise and and off-premise solutions. He said that Microsoft's strategy is to provide software, services and tools that enable customers to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing with the reliability and security of on-premise software.

"Our job, simply put, is to deliver what customers need to take advantage of cloud computing on their own terms," Muglia said.

"Some vendors would have you believe that you must move everything to the cloud now, and there is only one way to achieve cloud computing," he said. "Don't be misled and lose sight of the value of all the investments you have already made to enable the full promise of cloud computing."

Muglia said that Microsoft has gained valuable experience running large cloud services, including 600 million unique users on MSN, 4 billion Bing search queries monthly, more than 500 million active Windows Live IDs and 40 million paid users of Microsoft Online Services across 9,000 business customers and 500 government entities.

"We've said it before but we are all in when it comes to our offerings for the cloud," he told the audience.