Microsoft has signed agreement with eBay related to its new Windows Azure platform appliance for cloud computing.

Microsoft said that this partnership is a significant joint engineering effort that will couple the innovation and power of the Windows Azure platform appliance with the technical excellence of eBay’s platform – to deliver an automated capacity management offering.

The company said that its Windows Azure platform appliance is optimised for scale out applications and datacentre efficiency across servers. It consists of Windows Azure, Microsoft SQL Azure and a Microsoft-specified configuration of network, storage and server hardware.

eBay will incorporate the Windows Azure platform appliance into two of its datacentres to further optimise its platform and achieve greater strategic agility and datacentre efficiency.

Bob Muglia, president of Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, said: "eBay has one of the world’s largest ecommerce platforms, and we believe the Windows Azure platform appliance provides the scalability, automation, datacentre efficiency and low cost of operations that eBay requires to meet the needs of its customers worldwide."