Microsoft wants its UK customers to create more user-friendly apps, so it’s making Azure Search available in the UK.
Now available in Microsoft’s UK South data-region, the tool lets users do things like analyse the text typed into an app’s search box regardless of verb tenses, gender, irregular plural nouns or word breaks.
Microsoft says that customers will also be able to find context quickly and easily on a topic based on location thanks to search suggestions and highlighted text. There’s also geo-spatial support to help users find information on a topic based on location.
Graham Hill, Director of Microsoft’s UK Commercial Strategy Group, said: “Azure Search helps developers create apps that work for them and their customers. It is a great addition to the range of services now available through our data centres in the UK, which offer flexibility, security and data resisdency.”
In other good news for UK customers of Microsoft Azure, the company has also made available Managed Disks in its UK data centres.
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This is designed to, “take away the notion of a storage account for disks,” according to Microsoft. Basically it’ll allow customers to scale without worrying about the limitations associated with storage accounts.
The announcement comes a short time after Microsoft made available its Azure Backup and Site Recovery features.
All put together and you’ve got a concerted effort to win over UK customers.
With Microsoft opening its UK data centre region in London late last year, the task has been for the company to fill up the new UK South region with a bunch of services that should lure customers into its cloud.
On the Azure Search front, the product page says that it uses the Microsoft natural language stack, which is also used in Bing and Office, to help construct fine-tuned ranking models to tie search results to business goals. It also comes as a fully managed service.
