Windows Azure Is Discussed at the DEMO Fall 2010

Yesterday, at the DEMO Fall 2010, Matt Thompson, Microsoft’s General Manager of Developer & Platform Evangelism, discussed about the company's commitment to cloud computing with Windows Azure, and also about the importance of data.

He stressed the company's position on Azure, which is basically the same since its launch in October 2008 - Microsoft considers cloud computing as the next major computing platform besides Windows and the Internet.

Thompson said that Microsoft is planning to built cloud computing aspects in everything they ship and it also wants to be much more open with Windows Azure than it has been the case for any other Microsoft platform.

“We believe we have the most open cloud on the planet,” he says and adds that the company hopes that in the future, all users will be able to run applications across its Azure platform and their own servers, and also public clouds coming from government and healthcare organizations.

Matt Thompson, who followed cloud computing initiatives for 18 years at Sun Microsystems, said nothing about any novelties concerning Windows Azure, but he did mention Microsoft's Project Dallas.

Project Dallas is the company's Information Services business which will make a marketplace for data sets, because, as Thompson said, “data will always have value, [and] unlocking that data will always be an opportunity.”

Microsoft will compensate its slowness in adopting computer trends like post-iPhone smartphones thanks to Azure and its increased focus on cloud computing.

Based in Silicon Valley, Matt Thompson and his team look after the "care and feeding" for the communities of developers, startups and IT Pros across the western US.

Azure is powering its new web-based Office applications for now, and in the future, it might be a major component in Windows Phone 7 services.

Watch a short video from Thompson’s talk with VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall: