Azure Assured

The conference call with Tim, John and Jim in London was scheduled for 7.00am this morning. I thought the focus might have been on today's Essential MediaTech 2008 Forum. It went well. The new Chair of Pingar's UK Advisory Board Lord Erroll joined the UK management team at the Forum and Tim's presentation hit all the right buttons.

But it was recent discussions in the UK with Microsoft that really hit my button. And appropriate perhaps that one of the main sponsors at Essential Mediatech 2008 was Microsoft Bizspark.

I have blogged about Microsoft Azure before. However, I only really began to understand its implications for Pingar this morning. In short, once you’re completed the coding of an application, deploy it to 'The Cloud' and run it in Windows Azure and make it available via the internet to your end users. You can then scale compute capacity up or down based on traffic.

This has significant CapEx benefits. It means effectively that you 'rent' server capacity and can tune capacity and bandwidth accordingly. This clearly removes the costs associated with setting up large backbone capacity in terms of servers, bandwidth etc.

I am not quite sure how The Cloud and Azure is distributed globally. I need to check that one out. If Microsoft Azure delivers what it preaches however, it is a big step forward and one of immense benefit to Pingar.

We joined Microsoft's Global Start-up Accelerator Program in June. There is a meeting in London next Tuesday at which Pingar will engage directly with Dan'l Lewin and others from Redmond's Emerging Business Team as part of this Program. Azure will be very much part of that discussion.

And then John Beer hops onto a plane at Heathrow and heads for New Zealand. We have been planning an agenda for some time and I will post throughout John's visit. I expect to unzip further through that trip.