Windows Azure Platform Lowers the Barrier to Innovation

While many customers are still in the education and evaluation phase when looking at ways that cloud computing can deliver benefits to their companies, there are certainly examples of how prominent businesses are already taking advantage of the new platform. Some of these real-world examples are featured today, companies such as T-Mobile USA and Xerox, highlighting the work they’re doing to deliver value to their customers using the Windows Azure platform.

With the one year anniversary of the availability of the Windows Azure platform, these businesses and others have begun to experience the benefits of cloud computing delivered by the platform, such as improved scalability, rapid application development and deployment, and reduced hardware and software management overhead. In turn, the Windows Azure platform helps provide these organizations with more time to spend on innovation, creating new features, and delivering improved satisfaction to their customers.

T-Mobile USA was able to create and launch their Family Room social networking, mobile software application in just six weeks, built on Windows Azure and benefiting from the integrated development experience Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 delivers. There's also a customer case study and video available here which summarizes T-Mobile USA's experience developing on Windows Azure.

Xerox also took advantage of the benefits offered by Windows Azure and SQL Azure to create their Xerox Cloud Print solution, which allows end users to route a printing job to any available public printer directly from their mobile devices. Xerox was able to develop this service in just four months. In the customer spotlight piece, Eugene Shustef, Chief Engineer of Global Document Outsources at Xerox says, “For a very small investment, we can try a new project and see if it works, close it down tomorrow, or ramp it up immediately. The Windows Azure platform enables us to do that…Cloud computing lowers the barrier to innovation.” A video and case study providing an overview of the Xerox Cloud Print solution development is available here.

These are just a couple of examples of customers delivering real solutions using the Windows Azure platform. You can find other customer examples here. For general information on Microsoft’s enterprise cloud offerings, the Cloud Power site is a good place to start.

Thanks for your time and if you have questions or comments I look forward to hearing them and will try to respond when possible.

Thanks - larry