Microsoft announced the technical preview of Azure Stack, which the company calls the next phase of its hybrid cloud strategy and the only hybrid cloud platform consistent with a leading public cloud.

The offering enables companies to deliver Azure services from their own data centers.

“With Azure Stack, Microsoft is bringing proven innovation – including IaaS and higher level PaaS services – from hyper-scale datacenters to on-premises, enterprise-scale environments to meet customers’ business requirements,” says Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Enterprise Cloud Mike Neil. “Why does a consistent hybrid cloud platform really matter? Because it provides customers access to the rich Azure ecosystem, empowering developers, IT and organizations to do more.”

“Application developers can maximize their productivity using a ‘write once, deploy to Azure or Azure Stack’ approach,” says Neil. “Using APIs that are identical to Microsoft Azure, they can create applications based on open source or .NET technology that can easily run on-premises or in the public cloud. They can also leverage the rich Azure ecosystem to jumpstart their Azure Stack development efforts.”

“IT professionals can transform on-premises datacenter resources into Azure IaaS/PaaS services while maintaining oversight using the same management and automation tools that Microsoft uses to operate Azure,” he adds. “This approach to cloud enables IT professionals to have a valuable seat at the table – they are empowered to deliver services to the business quickly, while continuing to steward corporate governance needs.”

Through the technical preview, the company will continue to add services and content. It will be available on Friday, January 29. Microsoft will host a webcast about it on February 3.

More details on the preview are available here.

Image via Microsoft