Interesting Incubation and Innovation Projects from Microsoft in the Cloud spectrum

I was looking at the Windows Azure - SQL Data Services page, and looked at some of the Incubation and Innovation projects that Microsoft is researching in this area, and found this to be very interesting and so here are the projects that I found:

• Data Mining in the Cloud
  • This is very interesting because with this we have also SQL Server Analysis Services on the Cloud, and since Analysis Services are very important for companies to achieve the analysis of their data in order to perform better and to make better decisions, having those also on the Cloud and using the Cloud perspective of pay-as-you-go I think it will mean a that lots of more companies will start looking at their data differently, because now they can afford the costs of doing it.

• Project codename “Anchorage”
  • Since the appearance of the Web that a lot of options appeared to share files, photos, movies and so on, but the problem is that along the way we reach a point that we have everything so separated along the web that we lose track of it. Live Mesh tried to address this problem and is being pretty interesting in his usage, but what about if I have photos in Flickr, PhotoBucket, SmugSmug, and others as well as in my laptop? How can they all be synced? This projects does absolutely this and uses Live Framework in order to achieve it in a very interesting way.
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• Project codename “Huron”
  • I read this phrase “This is a Sync-Enabled Cloud Data Hub.”, and thought, What? So I continued reading and understood the Idea, because this is something that in some cases needs to be done when we are doing Cloud Computing, that is having a Synced copy of the Database locally for the customers, and this project intends to achieve this goal since it gets the SQL Data Services and the Local Database and Synchronizes them using Microsoft Sync Framework, this way providing the ability for customers to always have their data even when having SaaS – Software as a Service solutions. This way we have best of both worlds.
  • Watched this great small series of videos about this project:
    • Codename “Huron” - Access Desktop Database Sharing
    • Codename “Huron” – Making changes in SQL Data Services data hub and synchronizing to Access shared desktops
    • Codename “Huron” – Enabling custom database support 

• Reporting Services against SQL Data Services
  • Interesting, we have SQL Server in the Cloud, Data Mining in the Cloud and now Reporting Services on the Cloud. This seems very interesting because we can use the Cloud to take our solutions to the “Next Level” since we now have almost all necessary technologies available on the Cloud.
  • Try it here.

Hope this helps you see what we can expect and what level of Cloud usage we can achieve.