eBay and Microsoft in cloud computing agreement

Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ: MSFT) and eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) today announced that eBay will be one of the first customers of Microsoft’s new Windows Azure platform appliance for cloud computing, following a successful pilot deployment.

EBay said in a statement that this is a significant joint engineering effort that will couple the innovation and power of the Windows Azure platform appliance with the technical excellence of eBay’s platform — to deliver an automated, scalable, cost-effective datacenter solution.

The Windows Azure platform appliance is the first turnkey cloud platform for large service providers and enterprises to deploy in their own datacenters. EBay will incorporate the Windows Azure platform appliance into two of its data centers to further optimize its platform and achieve greater strategic agility and datacenter efficiency.

The Windows Azure platform appliance consists of Windows Azure, Microsoft SQL Azure and a Microsoft-specified configuration of network, storage and server hardware.

EBay and Microsoft will deploy the Windows Azure platform appliance this year.

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