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Microsoft partner, IDV Solutions, today announced that its SharePoint-based geospatial mashup platform, Visual Fusion, is now integrated with Microsoft’s Azure, allowing rapid creation of enterprise “mashups” that integrate data from virtually any data source into an endless number of applications.

If you are not already familiar with Azure, it is an internet-scale, cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. Azure provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. It can be used to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities. Azure features an open architecture that gives developers the choice to build web applications, applications running on connected devices, PCs, servers, or hybrid solutions offering the best of online and on-premises. Microsoft also offers cloud applications ready for consumption by customers. Azure lets developers provide their own unique customer offerings by offering the foundational components of compute, storage, and building block services to author and compose applications in the cloud.

Readers of this blog should already be well familiar with IDV’s Visual Fusion that combines with Microsoft Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth), SharePoint and other Microsoft technologies to create a visual mashup platform that allows organizations to merge data from otherwise incompatible sources—enterprise data stores, Web feeds, spreadsheets and more—into rapidly-built, interactive and collaborative applications that provide a single view of that data.

I’m pretty excited about this announcement from IDV because for three years I have been telling public sector customers how the Virtual Earth (now Bing Maps) web services model minimizes costs, given that the imagery is hosted by Microsoft—updates are done for you, removing that burden from your organization. No need for your users and IT staff to install and maintain data sets or even applications. While this has been true, of course organizations still have needed to invest in an environment to host and serve applications leveraging our mapping platform. And depending on whether their user base consisted of 10 or 10,000, this need changes.

But with today’s announcement, developing applications with Visual Fusion that feature Bing Maps just got much easier but more importantly, less costly and less cumbersome. Developers can now build their solutions locally and then push them up to the cloud to make them live and public. Investments in infrastructure, scalability, and maintenance are of less concern to the organization looking to create collaborative mapping applications.*

Nice!

The full announcement from IDV Solutions can be read here. Meanwhile, they have created and posted a demo that integrates content from Data.gov (Microsoft’s Open Government Data Initiative) and Bing Maps in a user-friendly Silverlight interface for all toreview at http://visualfusion.cloudapp.net.

Who’s looking out for your budgets and taxpayer spend? Microsoft and its partners, I’d say.*

Bing!

-=Virtual Jerry