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Windows Azure|Windows Azure enters India|Rajan Anandan MD Microsoft India during the launch of Windows Azure in New Delhi|Windows Azure and Flex together
Global software giant Microsoft on Monday unveiled a portfolio of services in India that will help companies share software and storage facilities, called cloud computing, that can bring down their total IT spend by as much as 50 per cent.

Windows Azure — the company’s latest offering in the area of cloud computing — is now available commercially in India, said Microsoft India group Director Vikas Arora. “Some 3,500 applications for Azure have been developed out of India alone,” Arora told IANS.

In cloud computing, companies share computer resources — such as servers, software and data storage —— through the Internet, instead of setting up such infrastructure at their own end.

This kind of computing has become a smart way of doing businesses and such offerings are estimated to have generated about $45 billion in revenues for service providers in 2008, and are projected to soar to $150 billion by 2013.

“We are today in India across all the three layers of cloud — infrastructure, platform or the set of services that are on offer,” Arora said, adding cost is one of the key benefits for a company that opts for such services.
http://beta.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/article221025.ece?homepage=true