It may seem like a long time ago, but Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud computing platform has only just hit its one-year birthday, and the company decided to use the big day to announce that it now has just over 31,000 customers.
The user base seems much smaller than what the company hoped to have gained by now especially compared to its competitors, but it is a decent enough increase over the 20,000 that had originally signed up during Windows Azure’s first six-month period. What is significant though is that much larger companies are now using the Azure cloud platform, including Xerox, T-Mobile and Travelocity, according to Switched.com.
This area of business is very competitive, with a number of other companies such as Google, Amazon and IBM battling it out for customers. Microsoft also stated that the platform not only now has 31,000 customers, but that it also hosts around 5,000 applications, a much smaller amount when compared to the big guns like Google, who claim to have around 150,000 applications on their platform.
Microsoft recently updated the Windows Azure UI in an attempt to make it far more intuitive; this came about after much criticism early on from companies trying to use it. Despite this many companies have found the platform to be very fast to develop on according to an article on Seattle Times.