Microsoft promises Windows Azure savings

Cnet - Microsoft still isn't quite ready to talk pricing for Windows Azure, but the company says it is increasingly confident there is room for it to make money at the same time customers can cut the cost out of running software on their own servers.

Speaking at a Thomas Weisel investor conference, Microsoft general manager Doug Hauger acknowledged that his case would be more convincing if he could share the hard numbers and promised that those would be coming soon. The talk was streamed on Microsoft's investor relations Web site.

Windows Azure is, essentially, a cloud-based version of Windows that allows developers to write programs that run off of servers that run in Microsoft's data centers.

"People are interested in pricing," Hauger said. "Before they make a decision they want to understand 'is there an economic savings?'... Us saying that (there is) is not necessarily helpful."

Microsoft announced its plans for Windows Azure at its Professional Developers Conference in October and opened the service up for limited testing. The company updated the Azure test code last month.

Hauger reiterated that, in general, Microsoft will price Windows Azure services via a pay-as-you-go model that he promised will be "very, very price competitive" with rivals such as Amazon. Customers will also be able to prepay for Azure usage to get some discounting, he said.