Windows Azure, from 0 to 10,000 and to Hundreds of Thousands of Users

Windows Azure had already passed the 10,000 customer milestone before June 2010, but Microsoft is nowhere near the goals it has set for its Cloud platform. The Redmond company has big plans for Windows Azure, as revealed by Kevin Turner, Microsoft Chief Operating Officer at the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2010, who noted that in the next 20 years Microsoft will work to deliver a continuous cloud service for every person and every business. However, the next step for Windows Azure is not really to make it ubiquitous, or at least not yet.

“Over 10,000 people are already using it, and writing applications. We need hundreds of thousands. We need every ISV and every corporate developer, and every partner writing applications in Azure. We're going to have an Azure Appliance for people that want to protect their data, and manage their cloud and infrastructure. We're going to enable that,” Turner stated.

Windows Azure was initially introduced at the end of 2008, when developers were offered the chance to start building on top of the platform. Microsoft only launched its Cloud OS commercially at the start of 2010, when it removed the Beta tag, and began charging customers for using it.

“Thank you for the support of Windows Azure. A year ago, we had nobody, zero people using Windows Azure. Today, there's over 10,000 paying customers, partners and end customers, who are building applications and moving forward with Azure,” noted Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Also at WPC 2010, Bob Muglia, President, Server & Tools Business, underlined that Windows Azure has enjoyed a fantastic reception from partners. “Windows Azure has only been released for about five months, and in that time we have well over 10,000 customers that are signed up to use this platform. The feedback we're getting from those customers is, "Wow, this is different, this is different than any of the other infrastructure services we've seen. We've tried them; this one is different. It makes our job much simpler to build the applications we want to create”,” Muglia said.

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