With the worldwide public cloud market forecast to grow 18.5 percent in 2013 to $131 billion in total worldwide revenue, according to Gartner, companies are beginning to place their bets in the high stakes marketplace. I’ve been watching as Amazon Web Services works to hold off its challengers in the space. One company to be reckoned with is Windows Azure from Microsoft.
Last week at Microsoft TechEd in New Orleans, the technology giant made it clear that it is going to be heavily involved in the cloud services market for the enterprise, where traditional on-premises software is becoming hybrid- or cloud-based.