Sitecore's position as a provider of .NET Web Content Management System (CMS) software has been given extra weight with the announcement of Sitecore CMS Azure Edition. The new offering is intended to help scale websites and related applications to new "geographies" by pushing them to any of six Microsoft cloud datacenters.

The company suggests that most organizations today host websites in single geographical locations, which can potentially undermine website performance if user peaks and spikes occur. With Sitecore’s CMS platform, system capacity can be increased or decreased within minutes — and deployment and subsequent management of websites can then be performed according to demand.

As a part of a cloud deployment, Sitecore automatically converts web content and applications into the Microsoft Azure format, allowing users to be up and running within one hour — arguably a much shorter time than it would typically take to provision and deploy a web solution.

Microsoft Windows Azure provides a scalable cloud environment with compute, storage, hosting, and management capabilities that link to on-premise applications. When coupled with Sitecore CMS, the proposition is that enterprises will be able to scale their web experiences both locally and globally to best meet the needs of their organizations and target audiences.