About 1 year ago I was fortunate to be working on the launch of Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform.  With the start of our new fiscal year, I was asked to take over a team which was responsible for the technical marketing for our developer platform product management team.  It’s been quite a journey, and I have been able to expand the scope of the products on which I am working.

Today, we are announcing the availability of the beta bits for Windows Server AppFabric, our platform for deploying and managing servers in the enterprise.  The needs of the enterprise developer now require that they think about not just deploying on the servers that they own, but also to servers that are running in the cloud.  The AppFabric technology is also integrated with the Windows Azure platform, allowing for the easy transport of workloads between your servers on-premises and to the cloud.

The functionality around hosting and managing services is critical when deploying new projects.  The AppFabric platform makes it easy to get a handle on what is running, and how it’s performing.  Additional functionality, which I believe will get lost in the press coverage, is the distributed, high availability cache.  Like memcached, our cache enables better performance for data intensive apps.  The high availability bit is new and could prove to be a game changer.

If you are already developing services and applications using the .NET stack, you are ready to go.  Head on over to the site and get the beta bits.  If you want to chat more about AppFabric, feel free to reach out to me.

This week should be an exciting one.  Not only do I get to travel down to CA and see old friends, I get to talk to a bunch of great startups, and cap the week off by participating in a panel discussion at Structure 09 – the 1:30PM session titled “Toward Cloud Computing: Private Enterprise as a First Step.”

The panel is being run by George Gilbert, who, like myself, is an ex-Wall Street guy, and he used to work at Microsoft.  He’s now running TechAlpha, and based on the few conversations we’ve had in preparation for the panel discussion, it should be a good one.

If you are going to be at the conference and want to get together to talk about your company or your cloud needs, find me by sending me a DM or @ on twitter – I am @brandonwatson.