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Another huge heaving grunt of a move as Microsoft shifts its great fat rear to sit more comfortably on the changing furniture of the computing industry and offer cloud computing services. It could be very bad news indeed for the storage industry.

Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform - ASP as in ‘we’ve been here before, surely’ - lets customers have their data centre applications run in Microsoft data centres. Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, said he was building an infrastructure for the next fifty years: "We need to lay the groundwork with new types of system and storage applications for a world of parallel computing."

Microsoft joins Amazon and Google in offering cloud computing services and cites IDC, which says cloud computing will grow 16 per cent a year through to 2012. That’s grim.

Company releases comprehensive Azure Services Platform for the cloud, offering unprecedented power of choice and open connections for developers

LOS ANGELES — Oct. 27, 2008 — Today, during a keynote speech at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008 (PDC2008), Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Corp.’s chief software architect, announced Windows Azure, the cloud-based service foundation underlying its Azure Services Platform, and highlighted this platform’s role in delivering a software plus services approach to computing. The Azure Services Platform is an industry-leading move by Microsoft to help developers build the next generation of applications that will span from the cloud to the enterprise datacenter and deliver compelling new experiences across the PC, Web and phone.

Ozzie described how this platform combines cloud-based developer capabilities with storage, computational and networking infrastructure services, all hosted on servers operating within Microsoft’s global datacenter network. This provides developers with the ability to deploy applications in the cloud or on-premises and enables experiences across a broad range of business and consumer scenarios. A limited community technology preview (CTP) of the Azure Services Platform was initially made available to developers in attendance at PDC2008, giving them a chance to try out its features and functions and plan for their own future development.

“Today marks a turning point for Microsoft and the development community,” Ozzie said. “We have introduced a game-changing set of technologies that will bring new opportunities to Web developers and business developers alike. The Azure Services Platform, built from the ground up to be consistent with Microsoft’s commitment to openness and interoperability, promises to transform the way businesses operate and how consumers access their information and experience the Web. Most important, it gives our customers the power of choice to deploy applications in cloud-based Internet services or through on-premises servers, or to combine them in any way that makes the most sense for the needs of their business.”

Read more @ Microsoft