Recently, Microsoft Corporation has decided to enter the cloud computing market, too, thus joining vendors such as Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel and SAP (the largest European software enterprise).

The term cloud computing defines Internet-based development and use of computer technology- with cloud being a metaphor for the Internet- that incorporates Software as a service (SaaS), Data as a service (DaaS) and Web 2.0.

Monday, at Microsoft’s Professional Developer's Conference (PDC), which is an annual event enabling the company’s third-party engineers to put together details concerning future projects, a new computing service was unveiled: „Windows Azure.” The latter is a software platform that allows third-party developers to store and manage data for Web-running apps via Microsoft’s data centers.

The company’s conference was presided over by Ray Ozzie, who replaced Microsoft tycoon  Bill Gates back in 2006, when he took over the role of Chief Software Architect, the other keynote speakers having been Senior Vice President of the Server and Tools Business Bob Muglia and Corporate Vice President, Cloud Infrastructure Services Amitabh Srivastava.

Ozzie stated that Windows Azure was representative to a transformation that both the software and the company’s strategy had undergone lately, in an attempt for Microsoft to make their way into the cloud computing trend.

Windows Azure stands out among competitors due to the fact that, according to Microsoft, developers don’t need to design programs aimed at keeping a balance of the amount of work required to be executed on an online service over multiple systems from different locations, since the platform is able to do that on its own.

Presently, Microsoft is planning to allow companies to rent out their computing service so that third-party developers could run various apps over the Web by using the company’s data centers.

Windows Azure, which Microsoft will begin previewing as soon as possible, will go head-to-head with Amazon.com Incorporated's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a commercial web service enabling paying customers to rent computers on which to run their own computer applications.

Ray Ozzie has revealed during the PDC that users who had worked with Amazon’s EC2 would find it easy to handle Windows Azure, since the latter has several concepts and features that are similar to the EC2's ones.

Furthermore, he added that when Azure would go from being a developer preview to being a business in itself, Microsoft expected the platform to start bringing in revenue from the very moment it went commercial, because the company aimed to price it so as to meet their expectations.

Nevertheless, no details-neither on when a Windows Azure license was to be made available for purchase, nor on what the fees would be for that license-were given out during the PDC.

Ray Ozzie has been designing the Azure OS for the past three years, ever since Groove Networks, the company which he founded, was bought by Microsoft Corporation in 2005.

Before having been named Chief Software Architect for Microsoft, Ozzie was best known for his role in creating Lotus Notes, a client-server, collaborative app developed and sold by IBM Software Group.