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Los Angeles – Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) used this year's Professional Developer's Conference to announce Windows Azure, a new services-based operating environment for what Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect is calling “Windows in the cloud.”

Windows Azure, he said, is not software, but rather is a service platform that runs on a vast number of machines. It's an open platform system that scales out by being able to host a variety of services in the cloud. With Azure, developers can scale, build and manage Web applications in the cloud by taking advantage of the computation and storage capabilities offered through Microsoft's data centres.

“As the system scales out, we'll build more key services onto Windows Azure,” Ozzie said. “It'll be our highest scale, most economical and most environmentally-friendly way of hosting services in the cloud.”

Dave Thompson, corporate vice-president of Microsoft Online at Microsoft, said many customers face challenges today such as staying up to date with minimal IT resources, while enabling both high security and high availability.

“By moving things in the cloud online, you can get to market faster because you don't have to worry about deploying servers,” Thompson said.

Amitabh Srivastava, corporate vice-president of cloud, infrastructure and services at Microsoft, said the Windows Azure platform allows developers to build “killer” applications.

“We're providing a scalable hosting environment for (developers) to deploy (their own) applications in our cloud,” he said. “Unlike traditional operating systems that manage a single machine, Windows Azure has an operating system for the cloud that manages the entire global data centre infrastructure.”

Windows Azure is built to be highly available and also offers developers a seamless transition to the platform since code can be written and tested on machines using existing and familiar Microsoft technologies, Srivastava said.

“Windows Azure leverages Microsoft's current tools to ensure (developer's) skills sets are transferred to the cloud,” he said. “It's an open platform that also works with both managed and native code. There are lots of opportunities (for developers) to take Azure Services and Windows Azure to grow and build out applications,” he added.

Syd Millett, director of Infusion Development, an IT-related service consulting and developing company headquartered in New York, with Canadian offices in Toronto and Waterloo, Ont., and also a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, said the company has been working with Azure through Live Mesh, Microsoft's data synchronization system for the past three months.

“Azure is optimized for the cloud so you're not bound to a single device or machine,” he said. “The key thing for us is we're building solutions for clients that take advantage of Live Services. We're able to offer rich user experiences, which is something that wasn't possible before Azure came out.”