 Welcome to News Desk on SiliconANGLE TV for Thursday, November 1st, 2012. I'm Kristen Folletti. Will the Halo 4 launch give Microsoft's Windows Azure a boost in developer usage? Here with his breaking analysis on the latest Azure news is SiliconANGLE contributing editor, John Casoretto. Welcome back, John. Good morning. Next week, Halo 4 will launch running on Windows Azure to power the entire multiplayer experience. Microsoft is using this opportunity to promote Windows Azure as the platform of choice for building and running applications. What is Microsoft saying that's enticing these developers? Well, Microsoft has definitely got a lot of interest in building up the Azure platform and really getting a lot of developers to come forward and come over to this side of the grass. In terms of Halo 4, they're touting a bunch of features that basically advantages that they've had in bringing this forward and then bringing this announcement to light. They were able to cut cost by more than 60% from the previous release. Team reduced development time with high levels of infrastructure automation, so they were able to turn in and replatform the entire code base in less than a year. Flexible on-demand architecture of Windows Azure, definitely a big feature. Each developer was able to use their own development environment and that allowed development and testing to run in parallel. So all of these things are pieces and elements of a growing in dynamic cloud-based environment that really helped them develop this in a quick and efficient way and brought the platform to light and in the end brought a lot of cost savings as well. Our developers buying into these claims that this is the most complete platform to build on regardless of their preferred language tool or framework? No, not everyone is buying into that, especially the non.NET developers. Now Microsoft has added a bunch of support across the spectrum. Some of the non-Microsoft languages, for example like PHP and Node.js, but that's a big issue. The big issue here is that trust is not really there, that Microsoft is really supporting them as well as they probably could be. That's not really based on much other than it's somewhat new. So it's a hurdle that Microsoft is looking at. They have to get through that and if they want to attract developers, in addition to the enterprise developers, they're going to have to really get past those types of conceptions. How does Microsoft justify pushing developers to use the Azure platform when Microsoft's themselves aren't even using it? Well, that's a big misconception. Many of their services are actually running on that platform or they're in the process. Remember the scale of some of these operations that we're talking about, you know, moving things like Office 365 out there, moving, you know, some of their leading, their bleeding edge services onto Azure. I mean, it's a lot of scale, but we know for a fact that, you know, Bing Maps runs on Azure. There's a number of other integration points. There's a bunch of new features and other ways to interface with the service. So, you know, we can expect more and more of Microsoft's products to really be based in the Azure platform as opposed to, you know, the legacy environments that they once were grown in. In other Azure news, Windows Azure Mobile Services will now support Windows Phone 8. Can you tell us a little more about the Azure Mobile Services? What does it do? Well, it's basically stood up to serve as a back end for Windows 8 apps. So, using the platform, developers are able to store data in the cloud, authenticate users, send push notifications to clients. It's basically the ecosystem that drives the Windows 8 application base. So, now that's based in Azure, it's in the cloud, all the benefits of the cloud and, you know, it's high performance and, you know, they're really building that up as well. Well, will this new support for Windows Phone 8 mean? Well, basically by using Windows Azure as the back end engine for push notifications, basically you're basically putting everything in one single framework that can work for all the different formats, allows the apps to be distributed through the Windows Store throughout the entire network. So, it really, you know, puts a lot of power into the Windows Phone 8 ecosystem altogether. You mentioned the Windows Store, Microsoft has announced the preview of a new Windows Azure Store. How will that benefit customers? Well, it's a catalog of app services. So, anything from monitoring, scaling, mail delivery, databases, things like that, things that really support the app ecosystem, all the different apps that are being developed and are going to be available in the Windows environment. So, new services such as New Relic, you know, is one of the things that came out. So, basically the ecosystem of partners will become critical feeders in the Windows 8 and the Windows 8 platform, Windows Phone 8 platform. Has Microsoft made any other announcements related to Windows Azure? Yeah, they have a number of updates. You know, more updates are always trying to keep it fresh. They've got a number of updates for Windows Azure altogether, including support for the .NET Framework 4.5 and Python. You know, we can expect more and they're looking towards building a winning platform altogether. I've written about the possibility of a pure Xbox gaming cloud in the past. This Halo 4 is one step towards something like that if that's indeed their end game. So, they'll keep announcing more capability, more functionality, and I think we'll see more of these things roll out in the near future. Well, John, that's our time for today. Thanks so much for your analysis. Thank you. For in-depth coverage on news of the day and breaking analysis on tech innovation, keep up to date with Newsdesk on SiliconANGLE.tv.