Azure News & Articles

Let's take a look at a few notable updates this week in web experience management (WEM) from Microsoft and OmniUpdate that look to make it easy to move to the cloud and enhance WYSIWYG capabilities.

Grab some popcorn. Microsoft has thrown down the proverbial gauntlet for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), upgrading its Azure cloud service for direct competition with Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

Microsoft has announced several Windows Azure updates this week including a Hadoop distribution preview called HDInsight.

Amazon, Google and Microsoft were going strong in their ongoing spat over cloud pricing early last December, but then things got quiet. Now Microsoft has announced the acquisition of MetricsHub which should add a little bit more edge to its Azure offering by providing software to monitor and automate resource allocation for Azure.

More cloud-goodness from Microsoft, which has just announced the immediate and general availability of Windows Azure Media Services. Enterprises that don’t have the resources, or even the will to build on-demand video without having to invest in, or extend their existing infrastructure can now turn to this service to do the heavy work.

Another top day for business cloud consumers. Last week we brought you news that Amazon had cut its EC3 storage prices by 25 percent, a move that was countered by Google, which slashed its by 30 percent. Today, it’s the turn of Azure, with cuts in pricing of up to 28 percent.

Could the key to better government lie in its mountains of already free and available data? 

This week in the document management world, Alfresco is back in the news with the announcement of a new integration by Ixxus to add Solr faceted search to Alfresco 4, Hyland is making its OnBase application more readily accessible through mobile devices, Lexmark rebrands Brainware and SealPath secures documents in the cloud.

DotNetNuke is offering its Social Web Content Management System via Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud.

  Following Microsoft's Azure and Google's Talk crash into the technology kerbside, Twitter has keeled over and gone to join the choir invisible, taking with it everyone's favorite way of moaning about the first two outages. 

Hot on the heels of the Google Talk outage comes news of a Microsoft Azure failure in Western Europe. This outage affects compute services for public and private cloud enterprise deployments, so could be a lot worse for businesses if it continues or cascades. 

 After the, hopefully successful, launch of Windows 8 and a mass of new hardware, Microsoft will start in earnest its push for Windows 8 developers in late October with a Build 2.0 event in Redmond. Likely covering everything developers need to know for Windows 8, Server 2012, Azure and Visual Studio 2012, will it help kick start Microsoft's Marketplace?

Microsoft is continuing its efforts to expand the breadth of its cloud offerings. Last month, the company enhanced Azure with several features, most notably, Linux support. Now Microsoft has its sights set on the private web. Microsoft has released a new set of tools that make it easier to create private cloud environment on Windows Server2012.

If there is an engine room for driving the development of social collaboration within the enterprise at scale, SharePoint is it. 

This has been a big few weeks  for cloud news from some of the biggest names in technology. Larry Ellison did an about-face and now loves the cloud. Both Oracle and Red Hat made major announcements about their cloud strategies. Hewlett-Packard talked up its public cloud strategy at HP Discover. Now, it’s Microsoft’s turn, and what it has to say may be the most surprising announcement yet.