Microsoft Acquires GreenButton, New Customers: Keep Out

Today, Microsoft has announced the acquisition of GreenButton, a New Zealand-based provider of compute-intensive applications in the Cloud and application-to-Cloud solutions.

Whenever a company decides to acquire another, it's always fun digging through and trying to determine the actual reason. Some acquisitions are done to bolster an already existing set of features either to provide perceived value or to mirror a competitor. Others are done to add features that don't already exist and would be too costly and take too long to develop. Other times, the acquisition is done out of spite – to capture a technology or company (or, even patents) before a competitor has the chance.

The acquisition of GreenButton appears to be a little bit of each. Using the GreenButton SDK, applications can be cloud-enabled quickly without recoding existing software. The company's Cloud Fabric product, gives Enterprises and Software Vendors unlimited computing power in the Cloud, enabling on-demand, highly scalable data analysis and output.

Mike Neil took to the Windows Azure team blog today to make the announcement and coined his own Satya-style "Mobile First/Cloud First" tagline of: "BigData/BigCompute."

Microsoft will be working over the coming months to integrate GreenButton into Microsoft Azure. Existing GreenButton customers can continue to use the service however, the GreenButton web site today says…

Our existing service is no longer available to new customers. We plan to launch a new integrated service with Microsoft Azure later in the year.