Some of the seven parts of the programme are relatively simple and clearly understood – for example, Microsoft and a grab-bag of hardware vendors have agreed a reference platform suitable for the construction of a pool of physical machines and virtual hosts to make up a private cloud. Other parts are frankly mind-boggling, like the cashback scheme. If you move to Hyper-V cloud and make it work for you, whether you’ve virtualised already or not, then Microsoft has some money for you.

There’s always a bit of a “brain gap” when it comes to announcements about virtualisation – it takes a while for listeners to get their heads around the concepts and bat back a few apposite questions, and I think Microsoft caught the assembled press throng well and truly on the hop with the cashback offer. Yes, it does extend beyond domestic US clients. Whether it’s conditional on making use of the new hardware freshly published on the Hyper-V Cloud compatibility framework list is an intriguing question. It’s also a bit too early to figure out things like return on investment since, there are no customers using this newly announced toolkit yet.

For whatever curious global-announcement type of reason, this year’s TechEd Keynote didn’t start until 4pm local time, which seemed to be all about an embargo on the story about Hyper-V Cloud – and the story was (from a selfish, egotistical columnist’s perspective) the usual Mashed Potato Speech – a whitish, bland smooth paste of words: long and exhausting exposition of very long product names used as part of very vague promises about very difficult achievements which, if it’s honest about it, Microsoft expects you to do all the heavy lifting to achieve.

I entirely understand its take on the matter; Microsoft believes it’s the only company that actually bestrides and has some understanding of the change to the role, workload and responsibilities of an internal .NET developer faced with the option of using Azure. But it is far from alone in facing the completely human problem of getting past the pasty and hard to distinguish product names, concepts and promises to grab people’s attention.

Keynotes are always a bit of an uphill struggle in the attention-span stakes, and putting it at 4pm after a Berliner lunch (mit bier) wasn’t a smart move. Even some of the demo guys were noticeably rushing their (faultless and entirely unencumbered) demos, which is why I almost missed the really big news.

The next major release of Azure is due Any Day Now. The Azure guy scampered rapidly over the salient points, but how about this one principal headline: Azure has a VM Role now. This, along with the virtual IP address services, means you really can make a .VHD file of a server (or anything) inside your company network, upload the VHD to Azure, and click “run”.

I bet there’s a fair number of techies who always thought that this was what Azure did, and who are a bit shocked to find it’s only just been made possible. I bet there will be lots of people who (quite fairly) presume that a product called “Hyper-V Cloud” is a bundling-up of this capability. In fact, it’s the opposite – it’s a toolbox to help you construct a Private Cloud of on-demand servers and VMs inside your business.

Despite the perils of juggling entirely abstract Mashed Potato concepts, product names and services, the announcement of Azure turning itself into a one-stop application shop and alternative to Amazon EC2 stood out in the day’s messages, as just the sort of first-step on the road that Microsoft faithful have felt has been missing.

One report, from our friends at The Register, states: “Nine out of 10 will also want to deploy the web-based versions of Exchange, SharePoint, and Office 2010 – due in the first half of next year. Stephen Elop (Microsoft’s business applications chief) didn’t reveal the source of the data behind his claim, but the message was blunt.”

I think not. In fact, I will eat my hat if it gets 90% business uptake of hosted services. The reliance on unreliable internet connectivity is scary beyond belief, and although I am certain that Microsoft itself will have huge deployments of this stuff, it forgets that its cloud services are effectively local storage to their network infrastructure. It’s a very different matter when your business is sitting in a village outside Newcastle.

And, to bang the drum once again, the SLA and contractual documentation is still a frightening mess. At least Dick Turpin had the good grace to wear a mask.

Because yesterday, I (and a couple of colleagues) had an hour-long “full and frank exchange of views” with four senior Microsoft Redmond people responsible for the hosted services offering: Eron Kelly, Senior Director, Microsoft Online Services; Kore Kourbourlis, Senior Director, Compliance and Privacy; Brendon Lynch, Director, Trustworthy Computing; and Mike Ziock, Senior Director of Operations, Business Online Services.

We went through our concerns regarding data movement, implications for data protection issues under EU law, SLA, the sign-up process, terms & conditions and so forth.

The discussion was productive and Microsoft, you may be surprised to hear, thanked us for raising these issues.

There is one update of particular importance – Mike Ziock, who runs the operations side of the hosted services, stated that your data is held in Dublin (in a redundant failover fashion) and is backed up to Amsterdam. And that under no circumstances would it leave the EU.

There is a concern surrounding the routing of email through the Microsoft cloud which means that it might traverse through Microsoft’s datacenters before passing into the normal internet in the USA (for example) but it was agreed that mail routing and spam filtering was accepted as a necessary part of information flow, and was not to be confused with the bigger and much more important issue of the geolocalition of core company data.

We asked when we would see an updated set of Terms & Conditions which reflected these new claims. They were not able to give a solid timeline for this.

So despite the assurances given yesterday, our concerns regarding data movement etc still stand – Microsoft needs to do much work to clarify and simplify the T&Cs such that they are both relevant to the UK/EU marketplace and are binding here.

It would be very disappointing if MS did nothing until the next wave of technology hosting, which will be the public release of Azure cloud services later in the year. As it stands, we have sets of T&Cs and other documentation which are simply contradictory in what they state, and this is not acceptable.

Obviously I will update as soon as we hear something concrete and binding from Microsoft, but for now the message is clear: improving, listening too, but must try harder.