While our recent announcement of Amazon setting up their Cloud Infrastucture in Singapore created quite a buzz among the startup/developer community, we are now excited to announce that Microsoft will also be launching their cloud platform- Azure on Jan 1st, 2010 to its customers worldwide. Along with Salesforce and Amazon, Microsoft also has its data centres in Singapore thereby ensuring that the Asia Pacific region will be well-served.

In the recent Professional Developer Conference (PDC) that was held in Los Angeles, Microsoft’s chief architect, Ray Ozzie said “The service, currently operating as a free Community Technology Preview (CTP), will remain a no-cost(sic) throughout January; from February 1 it will start accumulating charges.” He also mentioned that “The Azure CTP has been available to developers to allow them to test and explore the capabilities of the platform and tens of thousands of developers have participated in the CTP and have made a tremendous impact on the product.”

His vision of “three screens and the cloud” will allow developers to build apps that can be reused and delivered via the cloud (Windows Azure), on-premises server (Windows Server) or desktop (Windows 7), depending on what is most convenient or offers the best performance which provides the flexibility in terms of the devices they want to connect to.

What makes the Azure platform different from Amazon and Salesforce is that it is mainly targeted towards businesses that run Windows/.NET enterprise applications. Most ISV’s are running their SAP applications on Windows platform thereby making the deployment of such application on Azure much easier. Though Azure is all about getting developers tied to the Microsoft products, Salesforce and Amazon have a more open ended approach when it comes to integration with the development environment.

Microsoft has also announced a new data marketplace called Dallas, which will enable developers ” to discover, purchase, and manage data subscriptions within Azure.” Some of the organizations using this service as of now are, Seesmic which is building a Twitter app running on Windows using Microsoft’s Silverlight rich media player and NASA  which is releasing 3D images from Mars rover vehicle for free to the general public via the Dallas data feed.

The main differentiating factor between Azure and other cloud services will be it’s integration with different services. Where Microsoft focuses on integrating with .NET services, various Live services, Access Control services and Live Mesh services; Amazon doesn’t provides options to its users regarding the development platform they are using on top of the base OS.

If you want to find out more on the Amazon’s cloud computing platform and how does it serve compared to other cloud platforms out there, you should definitely attend the meet-up session with Simone Brunozzi from Amazon and the meetup at Hackerspace tomorrow!

Image Courtesy: Xconomy.com