It’s official: Microsoft partners will be able to run Windows Azure too.

The news was broken by Microsoft’s general manager of business strategy for cloud infrastructure services Doug Hauger this Wednesday as he spoke at the Thomas Weisel 2009 Technology and Telecom Conference in San Francisco.

I quote from ENT News:

“This is a beautiful partner opportunity, where separate from the [Microsoft] Azure [IP cloud computing] platform…we could help them with our technologies in their data centers and they could then provide that cloud service,” Hauser said. “That is a perfect partner opportunity in this space.”

This is a big departure from the initial statements from Microsoft on Azure only being available from the Redmond company’s own datacenters.

While no timing has been announced, this is a great step by Microsoft, enabling its partner ecosystem and making its position quite strong in competition with VMware’s vCloud which used to tout this partner approach as one of its key differentiators. So looks like this prediction we made on Jan 1 is already coming true:

The interesting aspect of that is that VMware really has the potential of forcing Microsoft to let partners run Azure. Today this is not the case and the only place where Azure exists is Microsoft’s datacenter.

Tags: Microsoft, Cloud Computing, Windows Azure
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