Enterprises will self-host Windows Azure someday

Microsoft sees future datacenters as mini-clouds and is cross-pollinating the code for Windows Server and Windows Azure to help companies efficiently manage virtualization

Future versions of Windows Server will enable companies to efficiently manage and provide virtualized applications through the Web just like Microsoft's upcoming platform-as-a-service, Windows Azure, a company executive said this week.

"The innovation in Azure and future versions of Windows Server will be shared, and that code base will continue to cross-pollinate," said Steven Martin, senior director for developer platform product management at Microsoft, in an interview. "The corporate datacenter at some point in time will look like a mini-cloud, partitioned by application workload." ... Go to source