Microsoft Corp. and eBay on Monday announced that eBay will be one of the first customers of Microsoft’s new Windows Azure platform appliance for cloud computing. This 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, scalable, cost-effective datacenter solution.

The Windows Azure platform appliance is the first turnkey cloud platform for large service providers and enterprises to deploy in their own datacenters. eBay will incorporate the Windows Azure platform appliance into two of its data centers to further optimize its platform and achieve greater strategic agility and datacenter efficiency.

This announcement follows a successful pilot deployment by eBay of Microsoft’s public Windows Azure platform, which offers eBay the flexibility to deploy certain applications on a public cloud while maintaining the reliability and availability of eBay.com. eBay’s page for iPad listings – http://ipad.ebay.com – is hosted on the public Windows Azure platform.

“Microsoft’s focus on and investment in the Windows Azure platform appliance shows they are committed to world-class cloud computing solutions. eBay has the right blueprint for next-generation software-as-a-service-based applications with our platform’s architecture, scale and reliability,” said James Barrese, eBay vice president of technology. “Joint engineering on the Windows Azure platform appliance with eBay’s massive, high-volume systems allows Microsoft to demonstrate its leadership in this space and helps eBay improve our user experience through a flexible, scalable and cost-effective solution.”

The Windows Azure platform appliance consists of Windows Azure, Microsoft SQL Azure and a Microsoft-specified configuration of network, storage and server hardware. The appliance is optimized for scale out applications and data center efficiency across hundreds to tens of thousands of servers.

“eBay has one of the world’s largest ecommerce platforms, meeting the wide-ranging needs of customers around the world. We are thrilled to work with such a technology and business leader as we help foster the new era of cloud computing with the Windows Azure platform appliance,” said Bob Muglia, president of Server and Tools Business, Microsoft Corp.

eBay and Microsoft will deploy the Windows Azure platform appliance this year.