Microsoft’s upcoming ‘Concero’ will be a new weapon against VMware

Microsoft is working on the construction of a new tool for its cloud offerings called ‘Concero.’ Concero is a “cloud management portal” that will “allow customers to oversee both on-premises and cloud-based services,” according to ZDNet.

Microsoft had a mention of the product on the topics page for the upcoming Microsoft Management Summit (MMS). At the time of writing, it had been removed. Before it was taken down, this is what Microsoft had to say on the now less secretive Concero:

“The move to cloud based deployment of services will result in deployments which are partly on private on-premise clouds based on VMM and Hyper-V and partly on Windows Azure. In this hybrid world, it is imperative to have a management tool that allows customers to deploy and manage their services across these environments. System Center codename “Concero” is a self-service portal targeted at this customer base.”

We have reached out to Microsoft for comment both on the existence of Concero as a product, and with regards to its removal from the MMS topics list and its place in that upcoming event.

Fortunately, Microsoft has not scrubbed all mention of Concero from the internet. A job posting on LinkedIn is extant as of the time of writing that, among other things, describes Concero in the following fashion (condensed):

The Concero team is chartered with building the next generation Management Portal for Cloud Services. This includes managing on-premises Services running on Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager and off-premises Services running on Azure (today) and Azure Appliance (future). The Concero team is a newly formed team, with an experienced set of people, passionate about the Cloud Management space.

Be a part of a team that is central to STB’s compete strategy with VM Ware [sic]. Together with our sister teams in System Center and Azure we will deliver a world class experience that will shift customers from VM Ware to Microsoft.

A newly formed team that Microsoft plans to use new tools to compete against VMware? We can’t wait to hear more. For now, until we hear back from Microsoft, if you are a user of the cloud know that Microsoft wants your business in a big way.