Microsoft is reportedly planning on changing the name of one of its biggest services, just a few weeks after it rebranded its SkyDrive data storage service to OneDrive. Today, ZDNet reports, via unnamed sources, that the company will soon call its Windows Azure cloud service Microsoft Azure.
Unlike the SkyDrive-OneDrive rebranding, which was forced on Microsoft after it lost a trademark battle, the rumored change from Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure is purely an internal decision. While Windows Azure was first announced in 2008 as "Windows in the cloud", the service and its tools have evolved since then to include support for running Linux in Azure-based servers, along with other tools like Java that are not based on Windows.
ZDNet says Microsoft will announce the name change on Tuesday, while the actual rebranding will occur on April 3, the second day of the company's BUILD developer conference in San Francisco.
Microsoft has been moving more of its services to Windows- Microsoft Azure, including Skype and soon OneDrive. It's also being used more in online games, including 2012's Halo 4 and this month's Titanfall on the Xbox One. In 2013, the company announced that annual revenues from the Windows Azure division had exceeded $1 billion.
Source: ZDNet | Image via Microsoft
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