Microsoft announced a number of new capabilities and services for Windows Azure at its PDC10 conference.

New capabilities and services include:

• Support for Virtual Machine (VM) roles. VM roles will allow users to move their legacy applications to Windows Azure eliminating the need to change code to work within Windows Azure

• Remote Desktop Functionality will finally be offered on Windows Azure. The capability to log into a running Cloud Instance has been standard on most competing PAAS offerings for some time.

• Windows Azure Connect allows users to configure IP based virtual networks between Windows Azure and on premise systems.

• “Extra Small” and “Small” Windows Azure Instances priced from .05 cents per hour per server. With the recent roll-out of competing free usage tiers from Amazon and free ITiS solutions from start-ups like Cloud Share, Microsoft might want to think about offering free usage tiers as well for this market segment.

• Windows Azure Marketplace is billed as an online market for developers and partners to buy and sell, services, training, applications and code components.

Amazon rolls out new functionality for it various Cloud services at a fever pace and the slew of new features for Windows Azure should help Microsoft keep pace in the PAAS space; especially amongst its core Enterprise and Developer users.

Vinnie Mirchandani’s new book; The New Polymath, is full of profiles and case studies that illustrate how the New Polymath’s within many industries are creating disruptive innovation to leapfrog their competition and introduce innovation to their respective industries and customers.

The  book’s chapters on Technology and Cloud Computing profile  innovations of technology vendors. In particular, Mirchandani uses many examples from the Cloud Computing industry. Calling Cloud Computing the convergence of Marc Benioff’s “Democratization of Technology” with Marc Manos’ “Industrialization of Technology” Mirchandani cites diverse case studies from Japan Post Network to Salesforce.com in the New Polymath to prove his point.

One profile focuses on how Netsuite uses its shared cloud infrastructure to quickly adjust its business based on market conditions and to benchmark against its competitors. Netsuite hopes to use its collected customer metrics to create Business Process Outsourcing Partnerships that will allow its customers to monitor business process metrics that up to now have been extremely difficult to gather.

In yet another example of the innovation inherent within the cloud, Mirchandani cites Cloud Computing poster child Appirio. Appirio has not owned any servers since its inception and runs all of its operations from lead generation to payroll in the cloud. Unlike its competitors Appirrio only used 2% of its revenue on internal IT versus the industry average of 7%. This type of advantage allowed Appirio to utilize more of its venture funding and initial revenue’s for R&D and customers activities thus allowing the company to grow from 5 to 200 employees without an IT department.

Like the Cloud Computing vendors; who are Polymath’s for bringing disparate technologies together for customers, Mirchandani deftly brings together disparate examples in an engaging book that provides readers a guidepost in how to also become a Polymath.

With this new offering on the market it will be interesting to see who dominates amongst Amazon, IBM, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure and Force.com as the environment of choice for Cloud development.

The following video shows developers how to create environments on the Beta Cloud.