Unified Billing Infrastructure

The Windows Azure Marketplace has a complete and versatile billing infrastructure. In addition, it can be scaled in ways that make sense with how consumers use your data and applications.

For subscribers, the unified billing infrastructure means that tracking data usage and predicting cost is simple— even when using many subscriptions with multiple content partners. Microsoft handles it all.

At the same time, publishers don’t need custom billing and invoicing systems. Instead, they get a versatile and powerful system that supports multiple tenants out of the box. For data, Microsoft handles fulfillment, and the Windows Azure Marketplace tracks all customer access and provides detailed reports. For applications, Microsoft handles subscription provisioning and cancellation and provides the publisher with a detailed report.

With the Windows Azure Marketplace, you can also create several different subscription models for a single offer. For example, you could create a free subscription with partial access and a premium subscription with full access to the application or data. In the case of data, you can also control how queries are performed—and even control what’s returned. Furthermore, we encourage content providers to tag the data and supply semantic hints to application developers and information workers. By doing so, disparate data can logically be combined and joined by clients to extend the power of the datasets.

In addition for all offers, you set the pricing, terms of use, marketplace descriptions, samples, and more. (марина)

Robust Security and Availability

Publishers put a lot of time and money into their data and applications, which means that security is of paramount importance. The Windows Azure Marketplace has security built in, ensuring that subscribers get simple access, but denying unauthorized access and preventing denial-of-service and other attacks.

The Windows Azure Marketplace runs in industry-leading data centers with specialist firewalls, physical security, backup systems, and redundancy. All these features are maintained by Microsoft so publishers do not need to build a physical infrastructure if using the Windows Azure platform for delivering content. If content is supplied from outside of Windows Azure, an SLA must be obtained to ensure availability of the content.

Analytics Features

The Windows Azure Marketplace offers rich analytics features for data, helping data publishers to extend the power of their data. In fact, using the Windows Azure Marketplace you can very simply build visualizations and applications using data from the Marketplace or you can choose

to publish your data driven application on the Marketplace for others to purchase, allowing you to use your expertise to deliver rich experiences to your customers. (КОСИЩЕВА)

Integration with Information Worker Applications

The Windows Azure Marketplace integrates with desktop applications smoothly and is an easy way to improve productivity. For example, a data offer could add information to the Microsoft Office Word Research task pane. In Microsoft Office Excel®, data from the Windows Azure Marketplace could enrich pivot tables and provide extra insights into business data. Reports in Microsoft Office Access®, Microsoft SharePoint Server, or Microsoft SQL Server® can mash up data from the local database with data subscribed to in the Windows Azure Marketplace. You can also integrate your data with PowerPivot for Excel for rich, self-service business intelligence and Bing Maps to use spatial datasets for quick, visual instant answers. (МАСЛОВА)