Windows Azure, the sky is the limit

We’re holding our Professional Developers Conference in LA this week, and along the way there are a few really significant announcements coming from our executive staff.

Monday saw the first public unvieling of the CTP for “Azure”, our cloud services platform.

There is coverage pretty much all of the computing and general press, the story in the NZ Herald is linked here.

The man who replaced Bill Gates as Microsoft’s top technical thinker said that Microsoft will compete with Amazon.com, IBM and other rivals in selling information storage space and computing power “in the cloud,” distributed across massive data centres worldwide. The system, Windows Azure, will let companies and hobbyists alike build web-based programs without having to invest in their own server farms.

Ozzie’s remarks at a Los Angeles conference for software developers indicated that after several years of disparate experiments, Microsoft is closer to a companywide strategy for coping with an upheaval in the software industry – the shift from powerful desktop programs to more lightweight, inexpensive ones that run over the internet.

… and from the BBC here.

The platform was described by Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie as “Windows for the cloud”.

The framework will be offered alongside the next Windows release, Windows 7.

The move sees Microsoft taking on established players like Google and Amazon in the rapidly growing business of online software.

The aim is to allow developers to build new applications which will live on the internet, rather than on their own computers.

Looking at some of the work taking place in the technology industry here in the region, this is a significant step for us. As Ray points out, you no longer need to be a multi-national corporation to draw on the levels of compute and storage power that is needed to build applications to serve the wider base of customers that exist on the internet. For Asia especially, where small and medium size businesses are a significant piece of the economies in the region, this represents a huge amount of opportunity.

If you’re looking for a little more reading on the shift that is happening in the industry at the moment then my friend and colleague Stephen McGibbon pointed to an extensive article that was posted in The Economist earlier this week.

The Economist just published a leader “Clouds and Judgment” together with a special report, “Let it rise” all about cloud computing.

IT’s global “cloud”
The evolution of data centres
Software as a service
Connecting to the cloud
The economics of the cloud
The long nimbus
Computers without borders

More soon…