Doug Hauger, General Manager Business Strategy, recently spoke at the Thomas Weisel Partners 2009 Technology & Telecom conference.  The wide ranging discussion covers an overview of the Windows Azure service and cloud technology more broadly.

Transcript | Webcast | PowerPoint 

On describing Azure… 
“What we’ve done is to come out with a set of services that we believe simplify the life of the developer, and make it easier for them to build applications that scale…” 

On how cloud technology might evolve…
We also believe fairly strongly that there will be this aspect of private clouds, and you could take healthcare as an example.  You may have a “private cloud” run by a vendor that would be HIPAA compliant, where you can have healthcare data stored, and it would be certified to be compliant, and yet still be run by a vendor, not run by the healthcare provider.  So you’ll have this aspect where we can get the economies of scale in managing that infrastructure, and managing the system, and yet still provide some guarantees around the data privacy and compliance.

On launching Windows Azure…
We gathered around some of the best software engineers from Microsoft to work on the project.  And interestingly enough, from a Microsoft perspective, it was relatively quick development.  So we actually developed the services in about 18 months, from start to finish.  Not finish, in the sense that it’s an iterative thing, but from start to where we are now.