So they announced the name for the Windows cloud platform, formerly code named Red Dog (and briefly Strata) – introducing Windows Azure. I like the name, personally, although even during the keynote at PDC there were issues with pronunciation (AZ-ure or uh-ZHOOR), the fomer being the accepted one, apparently.

What does this mean to you? Well that really depends and since I don’t necessarily know you I’m going to just leave the question aside and tell you what it means to me, and maybe that will help some of you.

Lake Quincy Media is a small but growing advertising company dedicated (at present) to Microsoft Developers. We’re a big sponsor of PDC and at this point most of our potential customers know who we are. We’re pretty proud of the software we’ve built, AdSignia, for serving ads as well as managing them and reporting against them. In fact, many of our customers tell us that they think our reporting is exactly what they want and lament the fact that other platforms fall down in this regard.

Since we have such a great tool, we want to do the same thing as Microsoft with their Cloud platform and offer our platform as a service for others. That is, we want to provide AdSignia’s ad serving, management, and reporting capabilities to other organizations who need to effectively serve ads, especially for networks of multiple sites. Doing that effectively has some challenges, since advertising platforms need to be very high performance as well as very scalable. Bringing on a new advertising network might require millions of impressions per day, overnight. This is where the power of the cloud comes into play.

We’ve been working with Microsoft for the last several months to build out our ad serving capabilities on top of Azure. Doing this will allow us to effectively deploy our online ad management platform to customers large and small, with massive scalability options as larger customers come online (hopefully realizing that Dart and Atlas are, um, suboptimal in some ways). We’re betting on Azure as a platform that will sustain our hosted service and provide us with the scalability we’ll need as it grows. I personally think it’s “a sure thing” that this Azure thing will be successful.