Microsoft's Azure cloud services will help fight Ebola, according to Nadella

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced today that its Azure cloud computing division will help in an effort to defeat the Ebola virus. Nadella made those remarks as part of the company's press conference in San Francisco that centered on its cloud efforts.

Nadella states, "One of the things tomorrow morning we're going to do is make available Azure computer power to the research community." He added, "In addition we have some tools that Microsoft researchers built to be able to do vaccine discovery, so we want to take all of that and make it available for the research community." No further details were provided.

Those comments were perhaps the most interesting thing in an otherwise lackluster press event, as Nadella and Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise division head Scott Guthrie announced a number of enterprise-based efforts in that part of the company. In a blog post, Guthrie stated:

"Our new G-series virtual machines, along with Premium Storage, will enable customers to run the most demanding workloads in the largest virtual machines available in the public cloud today. The Microsoft Cloud Platform System, powered by Dell, is the next step in hybrid cloud and brings all our learnings running Azure to your datacenter. Finally, we announced the new Azure Marketplace, an easy way for startups and ISVs to connect with enterprises and Azure customers everywhere so their innovative solutions can be deployed in just a few clicks. Last week we announced a partnership with Docker and today I'm excited to have CoreOS and Cloudera join them, Oracle and hundreds of other partners in the Azure Marketplace."

Microsoft could still make some interesting announcements soon, as the company prepares to reveal its latest quarterly earnings later this week.

Source: Reuters, Microsoft

John Callaham