Microsoft recently announced the acquisition of GreenButton, a New Zealand-based company that specializes in enabling computationally intensive applications to run in the cloud. As reported in VentureBeat, GreenButton began by building the computational power required for the graphics for The Lord of the Rings in 2006. Other use cases for GreenButton’s platform as a service technology include DNA sequencing, drug discovery, modeling for the financial services industry and three dimensional imaging for the oil and gas industries. Microsoft’s Mike Neil summarized the significance of the acquisition as follows:
GreenButton is a leading provider of integrated on-demand solutions that allow customers to manage compute-intensive workloads in the cloud. These solutions are known in the industry for their ease of use. Using GreenButton’s solutions, applications can be cloud-enabled quickly without recoding existing software – and without a PhD in computer science.
GreenButton’s “on-demand” solutions will be integrated into the Azure platform, although the team will remain based in New Zealand for the time being. As a result of the acquisition, Azure customers will be able to take advantage of Greenbutton’s platform for running high performance computing applications and thereby enjoy the benefits of enhanced access to a cloud-based platform that specializes in computationally intensive analytics. Microsoft’s acquisition of GreenButton represents yet another notable enhancement to its Azure platform as it seeks to reclaim its dominance in the technology landscape by enriching the value of its cloud products and services as part of its “mobile-first cloud-first” strategy. Terms of Microsoft’s acquisition of GreenButton were not disclosed.
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