Though coverage of Apple, with its new iPhone to be introduced at its WorldWide Developer Conference (WWDC), is expected to dominate tech news today, Microsoft is laying the foundation for greater recombinance at Tech-Ed 2010 in New Orleans. It is a venue where over 10,000 Microsoft employees, customers and go-to-market partners are gathering to learn more about the tools and resources that support application development today – and in the coming years. To that end, Microsoft’s staff has made Tech-Ed the place where it is unveiling “roadmaps” for the software development kits (SDKs) that will integrate things like the Office Communications Server (OCS) and Bing Maps into Azure, Microsoft’s “cloud-based” platform.

As illustrated on the Microsoft Azure Web site, the folks in Redmond are making a direct attack on Amazon’s Elastic Cloud platform, but doing so in a way that has explicit hooks into the latest .Net application framework. The special sauce is the Azure Platform AppFabric, as described here. Its intent is to make it easy for Web services developers to combine, integrate and/or federate resources and services regardless of location (on premises or in the cloud).

I mentioned Bing Maps in the first graph of this post because Microsoft is using Tech-Ed to launch a new Bing Map App Software Development Kit (SDK) with the expressed purpose of encouraging developers to build location-aware applications “on top of” Bing Maps. A new Bing Maps API, made generally available later this year, will enable developers to build more robust “mashups” that, at a minimum, will incorporate real time information (Tweets, blog posts, photos, search results) as overlays of the maps, satellite views and street views that have been fodder for some very eye-catching demos in the past few months.

Attendees were also excited to learn that, for the first time, Microsoft was unveiling the full list of features for both Microsoft Office Communications Server (Version 14) and the latest Exchange Service Pack. According to a company press release, “Key new features in this release include expert search, Office document and application sharing, and one-click meeting access from Outlook, SharePoint and mobile phones.” None of that sounds particularly new, but it is always nice to see OCS getting some props and exposure among a broader set of IT professionals and developers.

Speech processing, call processing and multimodal communications got little or no attention in the pre-conference promotion. Instead, Microsoft applied the Law of Large Numbers to puff up the importance of its announcements (which admittedly fall in the shadow of the announcement of a new iPhone). The importance of Azure is in its reach. As Microsoft explains, Azure is one of “the world’s largest cloud services — with more than 600 million unique users on MSN, 4 billion Bing search queries monthly, more than 500 million active Windows Live IDs, 20 million users of the rapidly growing Xbox Live gaming service, and 40 million paid users of Microsoft Online Services across 9,000 business customers and more than 500 government entities. Thousands of customers in more than 40 countries have moved to production environments with Windows Azure, an Internet-scale cloud computing services platform hosted in Microsoft datacenters.”

Azure is not quite Google (in scale or feature set) and it’s not quite Amazon.com’s EC2 in terms of support of ecommerce functions and back-ending IP-telephony switches and apps (think Asterisk, Twilio, Tropo…). Yet it is destined to play a very important role as part of the interstitial fabric among multiple enterprises for application sharing, conferencing and collaboration. There’s a long row to hoe, if it aims to make a mark in mobile commerce or the fast-growing world of IP-based, multi-modal communications. Then again, there’s no better place to get things started than a partners’ conference with over 10,000 attendees.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Cloud Computing, Microsoft, IP telephony