Social eXperience Platform (SXP) Powered by Windows Azure

Whether you know it or not, when you visit the Cloud Power site you’re most likely experiencing a service or application hosted on or utilizing the Windows Azure platform. Whether it’s the social media experience for videos hosted on the Microsoft Showcase site or visiting our Cloud Conversations section on the Cloud Power web site, you’re interacting with services utilizing the Windows Azure platform.

The experts in these areas have written a couple great posts on the topics to provide the insider’s view, one on the Windows Azure team blog and another from Bart Robertson, a Microsoft Cloud Architect who worked on the Microsoft Social eXperience Platform (SXP). In Bart’s post, he covers some key attributes, benefits, and improvements that the team has experienced while using Windows Azure during the last year including: scalability, agility, elasticity, performance, availability, and reduced costs.

Bart provides an infographic in his post that summarizes the compelling numbers from before cloud computing and after moving to Windows Azure cloud computing platform, which I’ve replicated here:

This summary is truly impressive when you consider the improved availability coupled with the reduction in costs and time to execute releases. I urge you to read Bart’s full post for the drill down on the details.

As businesses look at evolving their IT infrastructure, cloud computing holds great promise for improving business efficiency and reducing costs. The key is that this can be an evolution of existing systems and investments, not an all or nothing ‘rip and replace’. In addition to existing IT infrastructure solutions, Microsoft offers a full spectrum of cloud computing solutions including private, public and hybrid cloud computing solutions.

For more information on how to get started, what other customers are doing, how to get started check out the Cloud Power site. As always if you have questions or comments, please leave them here and I’ll work to get back to you as quickly as possible.

Thanks - Larry