Microsoft Azure News & Articles

At this year’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft (news, site) confirmed the upcoming commercial availability of their cloud services platform, Azure. Then they slapped a price tag on it.

Microsoft's cloud computing platform was initially released last fall and offers an operating system and developer services that can be used individually or together. The whole shebang will hit the virtual shelves at the Professional Developer Conference in November of this year.

Once available, Azure will be offered through a consumption-based pricing model. This method will allow partners and customers to pay for the services that they consume, and nothing more. Exact pricing for Azure’s OS will reportedly be US$ 0.12 per hour for computing, and US$ 0.15 per Gigabyte per month for storage. Plans include a basic US$ 9.99 per month basic edition and a US$ 99.99 per month business edition which comes with a 10 Gig database.

Cloud Computing is kind of a huge thing right now so naturally, at the initial release of Microsoft's platform, we considered the possibility that the company was "betting the farm on Azure." Do we still think that's the case? Perhaps. Earlier this year we saw upgrades aimed to woo developers and the pending commercial availability certainly speaks to the needed openness. It looks like these collective baby steps lead in one direction: up!

Follow us as we follow them and let's see how they do.

Enterprise content management provider Open Text has announced a “first-of-its-kind” records management and archiving capability for Microsoft’s new cloud-based operating system Windows Azure.

Azure is Microsoft’s new cloud-based operating system. Open Text will incorporate these cloud-based capabilities into its Enterprise Library Services offering early next year.

You can just imagine the excited faces in the crowd at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference this week when Ray Ozzie started talking about Microsoft’s move to the cloud. We’re sure anyone who develops on and uses their technologies is likely thrilled to finally be heading there.

But does it really matter to the larger IT world? To those who work with Amazon or Google? Has Microsoft merely met up with the competition, only to continue to support its own technologies and solutions?