Microsoft acquires Cycle Computing

Microsoft today announced that it has acquired Cycle Computing, a twelve-year-old Connecticut-based company that focuses on helping enterprises orchestrate high-performance computing jobs, large data workloads and other “big computing” jobs in the cloud. The financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

While Microsoft plans to use the company’s expertise to improve its Azure service for these kind of high-end workloads, Cycle Computing’s flagship CycleCloud service always supported a wide range of cloud and on-premises platforms, including AWS and the Google Cloud Platform. Microsoft notes that the Cycle Computing tech will help it improve its support for Linux-based high-performance computing workloads.

Current Cycle Computing customers include the likes of Novartis, Pacific Life, MetLife and other major manufacturing, insurance, biotech and media companies. Cycle Computing, which was bootstrapped and never raised a “real” funding round, says that its service will manage about a billion core-hours of compute this year and that it has grown 2.7x every 12 months.

“We’ve already seen explosive growth on Azure in the areas of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and deep learning,” Jason Zander, Microsoft’s corporate VP of Azure, writes in today’s announcement. “As customers continue to look for faster, more efficient ways to run their workloads, Cycle Computing’s depth and expertise around massively scalable applications make them a great fit to join our Microsoft team.”

Cycle Computing co-founder and CEO Jason Stowe  writes that his company will continue to support its existing customers, though it’s unclear if this means that Microsoft will also continue to develop support for competing platforms. We have reached out to Microsoft for clarification and will update this post once we hear more.

Update: Here’s Microsoft’s statement, which seems to imply that Microsoft will continue to support current clients but won’t put any new development work into support for the AWS and GCP platforms: “We will continue to support Cycle Computing clients using AWS and/or Google Cloud. Future Microsoft versions released will be Azure focused. We are committed to providing customers a seamless migration experience to Azure if and when they choose to migrate.”

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