Debra Chrapaty Unplugged

Debra Chrapaty, Microsoft's corporate veep of global foundation services, is chatty and refreshingly frank in the video interview. I love girl geeks like Debra. They're no nonsense; no bull.

"I am the cog. Right here," she says, with frightening self assurance. Om asks her about the money being spent on Microsoft data centers. "Big," she asserts. He uses the $2 billion figure from two years ago. "Big. Bigger."

When the woman responsible for Microsoft's data center infrastructure, foundation for its forthcoming services platform, says, "Bigger," the investment is even bigger.

Debra ranked No. 20 in my Top 25 Most Influential People at Microsoft list. If I were to redo the list today, she would move up at least five places, because services at Microsoft are big—bigger—and she's "the cog."

"We're really driving innovation in data centers," she asserts. "Now we're moving into containers. Containers are going to be big part of our strategy over the next three or for years." My eWEEK colleague Chris Preimesberger wrote about Microsoft's container strategy two months ago.

Microsoft's new data center in Chicago, what Debra claims will be the largest in the United States, "the whole bottom floor will be containers." She smiles, "I think it will turn some heads. It's some pretty serious stuff."

I've mostly quoted from the first few minutes, but do watch the entire 15-minute clip. Debra affirms other Microsoft chatter about a data center optimized operating system—infrastructure the company would "commercialize." She also describes data center infrastructure as a "differentiator." I see that statement as further explanation for some of Microsoft's interest in Yahoo, which has lots of server capacity.

She uses FedEx's control of key landing strips—distribution points—as analogy for data centers, which she describes as a "scarce resource."

Debra emphasized, "If we build it right, if we build it smart, if we build it efficient, we'll be able to drive a price point that will not only allow our own services to be highly profitable, but also allow us to enable other companies to be very successful."

Kudos to OM for snagging Debra at his Structure 08 conference and to Debra for being surprisingly frank, a little smug and remarkably forthcoming. It's time somebody said something intelligible about Microsoft's data center strategy.