Wasting little time, Open Text [1] announced support for Microsoft Azure [2] the same day Microsoft made the cloud computing platform public. Open Text's Azure support will be integrated into Open Text’s Enterprise Library Services. They expect products to be ready early next year.

Azure support by Open Text products will enable customers to manage Microsoft SharePoint content, Microsoft Outlook email and other business information they want to store on the Windows Azure platform. This allows users to apply records rules, archive content and address compliance mandates. Jens Rabe, Vice President of Open Text’s Microsoft Solutions Group says this should help drastically reduce the cost for companies to adopt content management, which has to be music to the ears of harassed CIOs trying to keep projects going in trying times.

"The advantage for Open Text is that we can decouple our value that we bring to the customers from overall investment consideration that involve the purchase of hardware. ROI calculations become a lot easier as storage becomes a non issue in the project plan, it has a fixed price tag associated to it that covers all setup and maintenance cost," Rabe says.

Open Text chose to go with Microsoft's cloud services because it saves them the expense and hassle of having to come up with a hardware infrastructure on on their own. "We're not a hardware company, our focus is on software. We have no intention to build up a huge infrastructure of hardware to support the kinds of services Microsoft is offering. A better strategy for us is to offer complementary software for what is in the market and offered by a major partner like Microsoft," says Rabe.

Related Articles:
Microsoft unveils new cloud computing platform [3]
Cloud computing is for the birds [4]
Microsoft: We are a 'mixed source' company [5]