Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

Today Microsoft announced the general availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, including Windows Azure Virtual Machines and Windows Azure Virtual Network. This new service makes it easy for customers to move applications into the cloud on their terms, saving both time and money.

Infrastructure Services is the final puzzle piece in our broader cloud solution. Combined with our existing Platform Services, Microsoft is now the only cloud provider that can offer a comprehensive hybrid cloud solution. Customers have the flexibility to combine their on-premises investments with our cloud based on their unique needs and scenarios.

This release is strengthened by an unrivaled ecosystem of partners. Canonical, OpenLogic, and SUSE are a key part of the Windows Azure Virtual Machines offering, which expands Windows Azure’s Infrastructure Services capabilities by enabling customers to run their own customized Windows Server or Linux images. In addition, you can tap into the Linux resources at VM Depot from Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., a community managed repository of pre-configured virtual machines that enables customers to discover and deploy common solutions in just minutes.

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

If you haven’t heard about the updates to Windows Azure Mobile Services, Microsoft recently announced the addition of support for HTML5 applications, giving companies more options to easily create engaging mobile apps that can quickly scale in the cloud and across devices.

With HTML5, developers can rely on web standards to build mobile apps that reach users across a myriad of devices using a single code base. The Mobile Services cloud backend can be used for both data storage and authentication and the new HTML support extends to pure HTML5 web clients, as well as apps built with cross-platform development tools such as Apache Cordova (previously known as PhoneGap).

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

Windows Azure Web Sites allows you to quickly deploy sites with support for multiple frameworks and popular open source applications to a highly scalable cloud environment. The recent updates to Windows Azure added Dropbox to the many options for publishing with Windows Azure Web Sites, providing more choice and flexibility for users.

Dropbox is a free service that makes it easy to share your files between multiple computers. Now you can simply copy files to a local Dropbox folder and with a few clicks your web site is live on Windows Azure. If you’d like to see this new deployment option in action, the below video illustrates the simplicity of the process.

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

Emergency clinicians and health care providers are great at saving lives and treating illnesses. But what if they could go beyond addressing immediate needs and be better prepared to help their patients and communities just by using the massive amounts of data currently locked up in patient case notes, social media feeds, school attendance logs and retail drug sales?

Ascribe, a leading provider of clinically focused IT solutions used by an estimated 82 percent of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) trusts, decided to create a pilot to answer these questions and help clinicians identify trends and improve services with faster access to information. With NHS’ ever-expanding sets of clinical data, Ascribe knew that a robust Big Data business intelligence (BI) solution could help their healthcare providers detect, predict, and respond more quickly to outbreaks of infectious disease and other health threats.

“If you think about each clinician who struggles with getting timely, accurate data, and you compound it on a national scale, then it becomes an immense challenge,” said Paul Henderson, Business Intelligence Division Head at Ascribe. “You have lots of small pieces of data coming in from multiple places, and it can be very difficult to aggregate and interpret.”

Ascribe worked with partner Two10Degrees to map unstructured data from Leeds Teaching Hospitals, one of the biggest NHS trusts in the UK, using a hybrid-cloud solution based on Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Enterprise software and the Windows Azure HDInsight Service, a cloud-based deployment of Apache Hadoop.

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing & Operations

Yesterday, Microsoft released the public preview of the Windows Azure HDInsight Service, our cloud-based distribution of Hadoop. The Windows Azure HDInsight Service is built on the Hortonworks Data Platform to ensure long term compatibility with Apache Hadoop, while providing customers with the low cost and elasticity of cloud computing.

Customers can perform Hadoop-based big data analysis in the cloud through the Windows Azure Portal, paying only for the storage and compute capacity that they use. The preview will enable customers to deploy permanent clusters with up to 40 nodes.

The HDInsight Service also works well with Microsoft’s business intelligence tools including Excel, PowerPivot, Power View, and Data Explorer, allowing users to easily analyze their organizations’ data and garner valuable insights.

For more information about Windows Azure HDInsight Service, including our work with the Hadoop community, see the Data Platform Insider blog.