During BUILD 2012 in late October, Microsoft announced the preview launch of the Windows Azure Store, a new service that offers first and third party apps for the company's cloud-based service. It joins Microsoft's other app stores for Windows 8/RT, Windows Phone and Microsoft Office.
In a new blog post, Microsoft VP Scott Guthrie announced that the Windows Azure Store is currently available in 11 countries and territories: the US, the UK, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Spain, and South Korea. He said that the store will expand to even more parts of the world in the next few weeks, but details about that expansion were not revealed.
Guthrie showed how Wndows Azure users can download and use a new app from the storefront, and he also put the spotlight on several new Windows Azure Store apps. Two of them come from startup companies that Microsoft helped to support with its recent Microsoft Azure Accelerator program. One of them is called Active Cloud Manager from a company called MetricsHub; Guthrie says the app "monitors cloud applications, anticipates resource usage and automatically scales the services up or down based on rules you set."
The other app that was created by a member of the accelerator program is called Embarke which Guthrie says, " ... builds unique profiles of each of your customers, and deeply personalizes communications to maximize engagement."
Source: Scott Guthrie's blog | Image via Microsoft
