Microsoft Corporation, the world’s leading manufacturer of software for business and personal computing, announced today that they will be hosting a workshop presentation on their cloud platform offering ‘Windows Azure’ at the Cloud Computing Congress, http://www.cloudcomputingcongress.com/ taking place on the 16th March at Olympia, London.

Eric Nelson, Microsoft’s Developer Evangelist will be giving an introduction to one of the leading cloud platforms that is at the cutting edge of the Cloud Computing Age. Attendees will learn what Windows Azure is capable of doing and why, how and when you should adopt the Azure platform that went into production on the 4th January 2010.

The workshop session is a must attend for resellers, developers, the IT community and independent software vendors (ISVs) who can explore the potential to increase revenues and decrease its costs.

The free to attend session will demonstrate Windows Azure PaaS offering that enables applications built in .NET, Java, Ruby, PhP, SQL Server, MySQL and more to be run on Microsoft Data Centers. To register for your free exhibition and workshop pass register here http://www.cloudcomputingcongress.com/register/free-exhibition.html

“For the past decade we have relied on Microsoft for underpinning technologies in our foundational SaaS, infrastructure services and innovations in the Media & Entertainment and Enterprise markets’’, said Darcy Lorincz, CEO of Origin Digital. “Integration with the Windows Azure platform is another market leading, evolutionary step for our company and we expect that Origin Digital and our customers will benefit from performance and cost benefits for years to come.’’

“The Cloud Computing Congress is an event designed for building partnerships across the board, and providing a good networking environment for those to communicate and take the cloud debate forward.” commented Ian Johnson, Managing Director, Six Degrees Events. “I’m especially interested in heading the latest in the demand for mobile devices and mobile cloud computing, and the challenges this presents.”

The Cloud Computing Congress will run simultaneously with other conferences including; Enterprise Social Media (http://www.enterprisesocialmedia.net, Social Media World Forum (http://www.socialmedia-forum.com), Mobile Social Media (http://www.mobilesocial-networking.com)

About Windows Azure

Windows Azure is the cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Windows Azure Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale and manage web applications on the Internet through Microsoft Data Centers.

Windows Azure supports a consistent development experience through its integration with Visual Studio. Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. Windows Azure welcomes third-party tools and languages such as Eclipse, Ruby, PHP, and Python.

IT professionals yet to see the real data impact of governance, according to Telehouse survey

London, UK, – 5th January, 2010 – UK businesses are primarily concerned with SaaS and cloud computing with 31 per cent saying it is driving increased use of data centre capacity, according to a national survey commissioned by Telehouse of over 100 senior IT professionals. With Gartner forecasting that the cloud computing market could reach a global value of $150 billion by 2013, it is unsurprising that 83 per cent of respondents predict that their data centre requirement will also grow in the next three years. Looking further ahead, over 80 per cent of respondents thought that securing access to additional data centre capacity would be either ‘critical’ or ‘important’ in the next five years.

Only four per cent said governance is driving increased use of data centre capacity in their organisation, suggesting that some businesses may potentially be overlooking the data demands of governance. Currently, businesses are required to retain a vast amount of electronic data for possible government inspection. Key regulatory legislation affecting UK businesses include Basle II and MiFID in banking, HIPAA for the pharmaceutical industry or Sarbanes-Oxley for companies with a US footprint.

According to a study by IDC Research, email and electronic documents, which now have to be retained legally, are a primary factor for the increase in the amount of information stored on servers. In fact, the BroadGroup estimate that storage of this data typically represents 20 – 30 per cent of a data centre’s footprint. If organisations underestimate this, UK businesses could be fast be approaching a tipping point where the requirement to store data far exceeds their current data storage infrastructure.

“The results of our survey indicate that demand for data centre capacity will continue to increase over the next five years, fuelled by SaaS and cloud computing, but we should not underestimate the future impact of governance and the pressure it will put on capacity, too,” commented Michelle Reid, Sales and Marketing Director, Telehouse.

“Until recently, there has not been the storage space in London to meet this demand, with many data centre vendors finding it difficult to secure planning permission within the capital. The launch of our new data centre, Telehouse West, in the heart of the capital, will provide UK businesses with the means to conform to regulations and grow to take advantage of the latest technology trends and meet the requirements of increased regulation,” added Reid.

Telehouse recently announced its Telehouse West facility, an £80 million state-of-the-art data centre in London’s Docklands that will provide 19,000 square metres of secure data centre space for UK businesses; the data centre is manned 24×7 by trained security personnel. The facility will act as an extended communications hub to over 400 carriers and ISPs. Value added ICT services will also be provisioned to support compliance with the latest government legislation.

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