And when we created Bing, we knew we were going to create a massive -- we needed to create a massive scale service because that's what an internet search system is. It's a service that's measured in hundreds of thousands of servers, you know, not even tens of thousands. If we ran that in a traditional way, it was going to be non-viable. So, we built a system with Bing that was a proprietary system designed to enable us to roll out thousands and thousands of servers with very low operations costs. And it worked. It was not general purpose, however. It was not something we could take and offer to our customers or even, frankly, apply broadly within Microsoft.
So, we used the technologies that were pioneered with Bing, and we built Windows Azure with the fundamental idea that the application is what you focus on. You don't focus on the infrastructure. With Windows Azure, the application never thinks about a virtual machine. To me that's the definition of PaaS. With infrastructure as a service, you're managing virtual machines and there are benefits to managing virtual machines at scale. With PaaS, you never see a virtual machine. You focus on the application. With Windows Azure that's the design point we built. The whole system, the infrastructure is all self-maintaining. All you worry about is how you write that application so it scales out and uses these underlying services.
When customers looked at that in our public cloud environment, many said to us, "We love that, but we want to run it in our own data center." Or, hosters and systems integrators have said, "This is a great model to enable applications to be built, but we want to provide it to our customers as well." That's why we are creating this Windows Azure appliance -- to essentially package what we've learned, the service that we run every day, and deliver it together with hardware that you acquire from one of our industry partners, one of our OEM partners, and run it in a customer or a service provider data center.
The reception, basically, is that, at the moment, I have way more customers that want this than I can fulfill. Way more. But we started with four customers because it's a service we're delivering. We're starting an extension of our existing Windows Azure public service. We're working with those four customers to understand what capabilities they want to take on. When an alert comes in, how do you want to manage that alert? What level of visibility? How does Microsoft get involved in that? We're hearing different things.
Some customers, for example, want a hardware failure to be reported directly to them or directly to their OEM. Others want us to aggregate those things. Those are options we may wind up providing. That's what we're learning right now as we deploy this. But as I talk to different service providers, different enterprise customers, we have a fairly long list of customers that would buy one of these things tomorrow if I could deliver it. Next year we'll expand and bring on a few more and then over a period of time we'll make this very broadly available. But remember, these things are not small. Today, a Windows Azure appliance with the first four customers is about a thousand servers each. This is not a toaster. It will never go down to just a handful of servers. How small is a question we're still working on.
IDG: Would you compare it with the sort of Acadia offering -- the Cisco, EMC, VMware kind of "data center in a box"?
Muglia: If you look at what VMware, for example, is providing, they aren't providing this massive-scale PaaS service like Windows Azure. Windows Azure is actually pretty unique in terms of being a general purpose platform as a service.
IDG: Would you compare it with CloudBurst and what IBM has done with the Java platform?
Muglia: No -- goodness no. What IBM is doing with CloudBurst is that their services teams are building specific installations. It's not at all like the engineering teams are building a single consistent platform that's being offered within their own environment. IBM is doing nothing at all like this. I mean, IBM is more taking their existing technology and repackaging it in a form that they deliver as a services offering that's a cloud. They're bundling with it the services people. To me that's the opposite of what cloud is about. Cloud is about taking operational cost out, not adding it in.
Windows Azure is really the only ground-up cloud operating system that the industry has really seen. The only providers in the market that are really platform-as-a-service providers are Google and Salesforce.com. Both of those are very narrow in terms of what they're offering -- single language or a limited set of languages, limited set of services focused on a given set of applications. Windows Azure is very broad in that it supports a wide variety of languages: Java, .Net, PHP, Ruby. It's really meant for a broad set of applications and is a broad set of services.