One of Microsoft’s key strategies for the future is cloud computing not only for some personal use – skydrive, office web apps and My Phone, but also business. Their cloud platform Azure hosts services like Exchange, SharePoint, SQL to name a few. There are few companies that do things at the scale that Microsoft does, which means Azure customers have access to ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Microsoft servers.
In a pay-as-you-go model, Cloud services are particularly cost effective for start-ups that want avoid massive up front investment for server infrastructure. Also those businesses that often experience peak demands at certain times of the year. Valentine’s day for a florist is the example used during my interview with Gianpaolo Carraro & Phil Goldie from Microsoft.
Cloud services are pivotal to another key strategy from Microsoft – three screens and a cloud. This means that content delivered to your phone, desktop / laptop and you tv are all stored up in the cloud. This provides new possibilities like taking your game status from the Xbox and picking it up on your WP7 device. An interesting concept indeed, it’ll be a case of wait and see just how well Microsoft manage to execute on this vision.
Watch the interview below.
More info @ http://microsoft.com/windowsazure
