Microsoft's Chinese cloud is cross-platform flavoured

Microsoft's recent agreement with China Standard Software sees the companies poised to jointly develop and sell "solutions" for the booming cloud-computing market in China.

"During cloud computing promises to move computing to the then and there level, a critical challenge that many organisations face is rationalising diverse technologies and different platforms," said Lu Shouqun, chairman of the China Open Source Promotion Union, or 开

The perspective of users

"From the perspective of users, we are glad to see cooperation between different operating system providers," said Fu Boning, deputy director of the Information Center for the China Ministry of Agriculture. "The cross-platform collaboration of multiple platforms is becoming a trend in areas like cloud computing. With more and more collaboration from vendors, the clients' entire information system will be better protected."

Microsoft and CS2C have as well pledged to sponsor a joint virtual innovation lab in Beijing for solution development and testing of cloud solutions that will allow clients to move to virtualisation and a cloud-based IT infrastructure.