azure

As Microsoft spells out the first service terms and pricing for its Azure development and hosting platform, ZDNet UK spoke to Mark Taylor, the company's director of developer and platform evangelism.

We quizzed Taylor about issues ranging from risk and resilience to private clouds and interoperability.

Q: When Azure becomes available in November, what will Microsoft be doing to convince people it is worth taking up? Taylor: Since last November, we have been running our CTP [Community Technology Preview] program, which provides the ability to use Azure without paying for it. That will remain free until November when we … Read more

Microsoft on Tuesday announced how much it will charge companies that want to use its Windows Azure cloud computing service when it is released in final form this fall.

The software maker announced a variety of plans, including one that charges purely on consumption and another that offers discounted rates for those that agree to a six-month commitment.

With the launch of Azure, Microsoft finds itself in a new type of business, where it competes with the likes of Amazon.com's Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com's Force.com.

The cloud operating system isn't launching in final … Read more

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had some provocative prophecies to share with the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in France, declaring that within 10 years all content will be online.

There won't be newspapers, magazines and TV programs. There won't be personal, social communications offline and separate.

But will there be Windows?

After all, the trend Ballmer spots in the media world is almost exactly the same thing that is roiling the software markets as software shifts to subscription-based cloud computing, a weak area for Microsoft but a strong one for Google.

Yes, Microsoft has Azure, an attempt to … Read more

Microsoft plans to announce next month more of the business details behind its Windows Azure operating system.

The software maker unveiled the cloud-based operating system at a developer conference last year. It has said that some of the services, currently in free testing, will be released in final form this year. The company has said that it will run Azure applications in its data centers and will charge users based on the computing resources they need.

In an interview on Monday, Corporate Vice President Allison Watson said that the company will get concrete about the financial details and say how … Read more

Microsoft's Server and Tools Business did the virtual conference thing for industry analysts last week. Fellow analyst Judith Hurwitz ably describes the limitations of this format. I concur with much of what she writes.

That said, I give Microsoft props for trying. A lot of companies have canceled or decided not to hold in-person events this year without making any real effort to put together an alternative. Limited interactivity and engagement aside, some of the pre-recorded videos were informative, STB President Bob Muglia was in typical energetic form, and I had good telephone discussions on a variety of topics. … Read more

Ray Ozzie is a big believer in the cloud. But he knows that large businesses don't yet share his confidence.

"Enterprises will not really trust the cloud until they get some experience with it," Ozzie said, during a speech at a J.P. Morgan investment conference in Boston on Wednesday. He said that large businesses are more likely to start by going with an online version of a familiar product like Microsoft Exchange than they are today to move a major piece of their business into the cloud. A Webcast of his speech is available on Microsoft'… Read more

Microsoft is trying to convince folks that its cloud operating system is more than hot air.

The software maker unveiled Windows Azure at its Professional Developers Conference in October. Since then, the company has said that pieces of Azure will be ready in final form by the end of the year, but the company has been rather quiet about how Azure is doing.

In a phone interview last week, Microsoft senior director Steven Martin said that Microsoft has been adding more users to Azure every day, though he won't say how many people are using the service at this … Read more

There were two very interesting pieces of news to come out in the last week related to the availability of relational databases in the cloud. One involved a start-up you have almost certainly never heard of, and the other involves a major player in on-premise database products.

The first was an announcement to the crowd at "Whose Cloud is It Anyway?"--a "roundtable and meet-up" sponsored by TechCrunch, held Friday on Microsoft's Mountain View, Calif., campus.

(Charles Cooper has more on the "roundtable" portion of the program. My favorite part of the afternoon was the fun comment by Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff; he noted the irony of hosting a cloud-computing meeting at the facilities of the vendor most disrupted by the trend.)

During the "pitch" section of the afternoon, Justin Santa Barbara of start-up FathomDB announced that the company has released to beta testing a sort of virtual managed hosting service for "standard relational databases" running on Amazon.com's Elatic Compute Cloud, or EC2, service. (There is a video of the afternoon's pitches; FathomDB starts at about 49:30.)

The start-up's current service simply allows someone to get a basic relational database management system, or RDBMS, instance (initially MySQL) up and running in minutes under its management, with services including creation, monitoring, and backup.… Read more

Microsoft still isn't quite ready to talk pricing for Windows Azure, but the company says it is increasingly confident there is room for it to make money at the same time customers can cut the cost out of running software on their own servers.

Speaking at a Thomas Weisel investor conference, Microsoft general manager Doug Hauger acknowledged that his case would be more convincing if he could share the hard numbers and promised that those would be coming soon. The talk was streamed on Microsoft's investor relations Web site.

Windows Azure is, essentially, a cloud-based version of Windows … Read more