Behind Your Business

Microsoft showed Tuesday that it has its head firmly in the clouds as it announced the Windows Azure platform will be at full capacity on Jan. 1. The announcement by Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles described Azure and SQL Azure as "core elements of the company's cloud-services strategy."

As the world moves into "an era of solutions that are experienced by users across PCs, phones and the web" and delivered from remote data centers, Ozzie said, Windows Azure and SQL Azure will meet those needs because they were built "specifically for this era of cloud computing."

'Three Screens and a Cloud'

Ozzie described Microsoft's vision of the future of software delivery as "three screens and a cloud," with the screens being PCs, phones and TVs connected by cloud-based services.

The company intends for Azure to provide a platform that remotely handles the complexity of development and deployment environments, with access to virtually unlimited additional capacity quickly and on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Also unveiled was an online marketplace for the company's partners to sell their applications. Called Microsoft Pinpoint, one of its products will be the company's own information service, code-named Dallas, that allows developers to gain access to data sets and content on any platform. Dallas' offerings include content and data from the Associated Press, WaveMarket, the United Nations, NASA, infoUSA and others.

In Microsoft's vision, developers would use .NET Framework, Visual Studio tools and technologies, and such third-party tools as Eclipse. A customer's applications could be located in private or public clouds and extended with cloud-based services, and resources quickly provisioned if needed.

Also introduced was Windows Server AppFabric, a set of integrated technologies for developing and managing IIS-based apps on either a server or in the cloud. AppFabric's hosting and caching technologies, combined with the...