Azure

Microsoft said its application virtualization software due later this year will let applications run on its Azure cloud as well as in the data center.

On the anniversary of Windows Azure’s introduction, the cloud platform market targeted by Microsoft is dwarfed by infrastructure and software clouds.

Oddly, given how ephemeral the whole cloud-service environment can be, no major vendor has made length-of-service guarantees an issue. Until now.

Offering software and server platforms online inherently conflicts with companies that sell it for on-premise use; cloud and SAAS providers are proliferating so quickly, though, that Microsoft won't keep butting heads directly with partners. They'll be lucky to find each other.

Microsoft's Azure is designed to make it easy to run .NET apps; now you can also launch VMs to run regular apps, too. That may seem like a small change; it's not.

So how has Monday's news that Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie is leaving the company being interpreted by industry observers?

Microsoft Corp. will bring BI and analytic services to its Windows Azure cloud computing platform, though it is unlikely to arrive before 2013, an executive said Thursday.

Microsoft is blaming a routine OS upgrade for an outage that hit its Azure cloud-computing infrastructure over the weekend.