Microsoft is extending efforts on its cloud solutions, particularity for small developers and SME enterprises. In an attempt to attract developer community that runs smaller apps on its Azure platform, Microsoft, starting October 1st, decided to cut the price of extra small compute by 20 percent. Additionally, Microsoft will allocate small computing hours in simple and flexible way to provide better services to customers.

As an introductory special offer, Microsoft is offering both 750 extra small compute hours and 750 small compute hours for the months of August and September for customers who sign up prior to October 1.  The company also is allowing customers more freedom in how they use their compute hours, but the price per GB for outbound data transfers will remain the same.

According to the post on Microsoft Windows Azure Team Blog,

“On August 1, we increased the number of small hours included in this offer from 25 to 750.  For the months of August and September, Introductory Special users will get both 750 extra small compute hours and 750 small compute hours.  Once small hours and extra -small hours are swappable beginning on October 1, Introductory Special will only include 750 small hours.”

Microsoft Windows Azure is tightly integrated with Visual Studio, PHP and Java. After its inception, Microsoft started providing free trial for Windows Azure until September 30, 2011 to developers.  As a free trial developers would get 20GB of storage with 50k Storage transactions, 1GB Web Edition SQL Azure database for 90 days, 20GB each in and out of data transactions and 128MB AppFabric caching.

Microsoft is looking to take advantage in another area of the cloud as well using its Azure platform including ERP, healthcare solutions. It is planning to offer a Windows Azure-hosted version of the Dynamics NAV product next year.  Microsoft has also released project Daytona, designed to support a wide class of data analytics and machine-learning algorithms.  Microsoft also offers Windows Azure Table Storage, which is similar to Google’s BigTable or Hadoop’s data store Apache HBase, and is targeting small business users.

VMware also updated the current price of their vSphere products,  Amazon introduced several new features to its cloud platform this month, and extends its support for Windows Server 2008 R2.

Azure continues to gain partners and clients, as General Mills has introduced a cloud-based consumer web site, Gluten Freely, based on Microsoft’s platform.  The website would help consumers to locate and shop for gluten free food products, and provides diet and health tips for those with the Celiac disease.