Microsoft has secured its first agreement with a company based in China for its Windows Azure cloud-based platform. In this case, the company is PPTV, an Internet service provider who has some big plans for Windows Azure.
News.com reports that PPTV will be launching a new web TV service that will be hosted by servers powered by Windows Azure. It will be called Asia TV Networks (ATN) and will allow companies from around the world to upload content for use by ATN.
In addition to today"s agreement, Microsoft and PPTV have also announced they will be discussing even more collaborations for online TV services as well as other possible partnerships. In a statement, Chuang Tao, chief executive of PPTV, said:
With Windows Azure, we can offer scale and flexibility not found anywhere else. We can also avoid unpredictable resource and demand fluctuations globally. PPTV ATN can thus pass on these benefits to our partners, and in the end to our global customers. This is a new competitive edge for our business.
Windows Azure has been in the news lately, but for some unfortunate reasons. Microsoft experienced some downtime in its Windows Azure datacenters in Western Europe a couple of weeks ago. The company later admitted that a "safely valve" that was supposed to limit the number of connections that the Azure server hardware could accept did not work as planned.
Source: News.com