CEO Nadella to talk up what's next for Microsoft's cloud

Microsoft is holding a "What's ahead for Microsoft's Cloud" event on October 20 in San Francisco.

CEO Satya Nadella and Executive Vice President of Microsoft's Cloud & Enterprise group Scott Guthrie will both be presiding during the one-hour event for press and analysts.

The event will take place from 11 am to 12 noon (Pacific) and will be webcast live on the Microsoft News Center.

I'm hearing the event will include both a look at how Microsoft's approach is different from its competitors, as well as a recap on cloud investments the company has been making. No doubt there will be some news, as well. 

During a recent Citi Global Tech Conference appearance, Guthrie talked up Microsoft's scale as one of its big differentiators. The company is running datacenters in 17 regions worldwide. 

Guthrie also talked up the importance of Intune, Microsoft's mobile-device-management service, and the Enterprise Mobility Suite, which includes Intune, during his Citi appearance. He also mentioned Microsoft's Azure ML machine-learning service, currently available in preview form, as key to the company's cloud strategy.

Microsoft is continuing to crank out meaty, regular updates to Azure about every two- to three weeks. Last week alone, Microsoft announced general availability of its Redis Cache Service; general availability of its Disaster Recovery to Azure (using Azure Site Recovery) service; the public preview of Elastic Scale for Azure SQL Database; additional features for its DocumentDB NoSQL service and more.