This post was written by Mulah Johnson

Microsoft Corp. intends its new Windows Azure Services Platform to be a serious cloud computing platform for a broad range of developers and scenarios. There’s a tremendous amount of capability being presented in the Azure CTP (Community Technology Preview), and there’s more to come. It goes beyond simple Web hosting to a flexible architecture designed to automatically enlist additional resources in response to demand. It currently looks a lot like an ASP.Net application, although it has some restrictions and additional features.

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This post was written by Mulah Johnson

Microsoft Corp.’s new business applications division head, Stephen Elop, said that the company expects a “substantial portion” of revenues of this core division to come from online applications over the next few years. Elop said that he wants to “aggressively facilitate” the re-engineering of Microsoft’s Office division for a world where business applications increasingly are stored off-premise, a development known as “cloud computing.” The move would prove to be a critical shift for the company whose most of the software is stored on customers’ desktop computers.
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This post was written by Mulah Johnson

According to an article from The NYTimes, The latest jargon in the IT industry is cloud computing, which is rapidly being accepted by top-notch firms such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Cloud computing is basically about obtaining computing resources, such as processing, storage, messaging, databases and so on, from someplace outside your own four walls, and paying only for what you use.

Although the concept itself is not new - earlier it was called time sharing - it is gaining popularity now like never before.

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This post was written by Melissa Chang

Microsoft is predicting that millions of e-mail accounts will move to the cloud over the next five years. In an interview with Reuters, Chris Capossela, who manages Microsoft’s Office products, said the company will see more and more companies abandon their own in-house computer systems and shift to “cloud computing,” a less expensive alternative.

This shift to cloud computing will change the revenue model at some divisions of Microsoft. Currently, customers pay Microsoft a licensing fee for the software, then buy their own computer and hire their own technology staff to manage those systems. In a services business, the customer pays Microsoft a larger fee, since Microsoft also runs and maintains all the hardware.

Microsoft said it continues to build up its infrastructure, adding roughly 10,000 powerful computer servers a month to its data centers, about the equivalent of what Facebook uses, according to Capossela.

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