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Windows Azure To Become 'Microsoft Azure' Next Month

Effective April 3, Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud platform will be officially be called "Microsoft Azure."

Microsoft billed the name change as a strategic decision in its announcement Tuesday. "This change reflects Microsoft's strategy and focus on Azure as the public cloud platform for customers as well as for our own services Office 365, Dynamics CRM, Bing, OneDrive, Skype, and Xbox Live," the company said.

Windows Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing platform supporting .NET, but also Python, Ruby and Java languages. It also supports Windows Server and Linux operating systems.

The name change was leaked earlier to ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley, who reported it on Monday.

Microsoft early on had linked Windows Server and Windows Azure together. The idea was to promise smooth transitions from premises-based server environments to Windows Azure. That's still a big focus, particularly with the Windows Azure Virtual Machines service launched last April.

Microsoft announced the availability of virtual machine images of Oracle's relational database management software earlier this month. Organizations can run those solutions in a virtual machine by selecting an image from the Windows Azure Management Console.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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