Microsoft adds app, data marketplace to Windows Azure

Cloud platform expanded to take on rivals such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft says at PDC          By Eric Lai | Computerworld
Microsoft said today that its upcoming Windows Azure cloud computing platformwill come with marketplaces for both online apps built to run on Azureas well as datasets that companies can use to build their own apps.
PinPoint.com will host business-oriented apps developed by Microsoftpartners, chief software architect Ray Ozzie said during a keynotespeech at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference 2009 (PDC09)in Los Angeles.
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PinPoint will compete with Salesforce.com's four-year-old AppExchange online marketplace and other more recently emerging app stores.
Azure will also host "an open catalog and marketplace for public and commercial data" code-named Dallas, Ozzie said. Developers can use the data to build their own services and mashups. Dallas is now in Commercial Technical Preview.
Microsoftis also bolstering Azure with management tools for developers running.Net apps on-premises and with Azure that are less sexy, but arguablymore essential.
Windows Azure, meanwhile, will officially gointo production on January 1, but customers won't be billed untilFebruary 1, Ozzie said. Azure will be hosted at three pairs of datacenters: Chicago and San Antonio for North America, Dublin andAmsterdam for Europe, and Singapore and Hong Kong for Asia.
Azurewill compete with Salesforce, Amazon.com, and many other cloud platformproviders. The key difference is that Azure, rather than dumping thedesktop entirely for the Web, keeps the Windows operating system in theequation.
This vision of "three screens and the cloud" willallow developers to build apps that can be reused and delivered via thecloud (Windows Azure), on-premises server (Windows Server), or desktop(Windows 7), depending on what is most convenient or offers the bestperformance, Ozzie said.
To demonstrate how far Windows Azurehas come, Microsoft enlisted the aid of some traditional antagonists:Silicon Valley startups and the federal government. San Francisco-basedAutomattic is using Azure to host parts of its popular Wordpressblogging platform, said founder Matt Mullenweg. Another San Francisostartup, Seesmic, is building a Twitter app running on Windows usingMicrosoft's Silverlight rich media player, said CEO Loic LeMeur.
NASA is releasing 3D imagery from the Mars rover vehiclefor free to the general public via the Dallas data feed. Federal CIOVivek Kundra said the government plans to accelerate the release ofmore data to the public. He likened the potential "explosion" of appsto the one that followed after the U.S. government liberalized theavailability of GPS data.
To demonstrate that Azure can scale toneeds, Microsoft's president of its Server & Tools Division, BobMuglia, cited its Bing search app, which runs on more than 100,000servers. Muglia also announced Project Sydney, which will allowcompanies to connect their own servers to Azure-based services. Sydneywill go into beta next year.
Finally, Muglia announced a beta of an application server for Windows Server called AppFabric.AppFabric will help developers manage both on-premises servers and Azure cloud-based services. It includes features from the Dublin app server and the Velocity caching technology. AppFabric will go into beta next year.