Microsoft is partnering with rival Intuit with the shared goal of getting more developers to write cloud-hosted applications targeted at small businesses.
The pair announced they’re releasing a beta of
a new software development kit (SDK) for Azure, and that Intuit will be recommending to its partners and customers Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud operating system as a “preferred platform” for hosted small-business applications. The SDK is a set of tools, code samples and services aimed at enabling Azure-hosted apps to federate them with
Intuit’s Partner Platform (IPP) and sell them in Intuit’s App Center marketplace. The final Version 1 of the SDK is slated for February 2010.