Techradar took a closer look at Microsoft's new Azure Marketplace

The Marketplace is an app store for SaaS applications and data sets that businesses can use for BI and big data, with the usual app store features of trials and integrated billing. It boasts some bigger name apps, including Cloudera – this Hadoop-based big data platform has previously been something you would run on your own Hadoop cluster (on-premise or in the cloud). Now you can buy it as a service you can run on Azure (or on a Microsoft private cloud on-premise) without needing to set it up.Quality appsPicking those kind of quality enterprise tools is what the Azure Marketplace is about, Azure corporate vice president Jason Zander told TechRadar Pro – there are no automated approvals, the way Google Play and the Windows Phone Store let developers publish.Zander notes: We're bringing together startups and independent software developers with our Enterprise customers and we want to make sure they have an awesome experience. So we're working very closely with the first partners and we're doing a curation process – that is primarily making sure that everything that's in the marketplace has been tested and is great quality. That means there might be a small number of apps to start with but we'll hit acceleration mode pretty quickly, he claims.Initially, the Azure Marketplace is separate from the Azure agent, which lets you run monitoring or management tools inside your Azure virtual machines automatically, but Zander predicts that they'll come together in the future. The agent is one of the mechanisms for how we can make it easier as you build this kind of software.

  A closer look at Microsoft's new Azure Marketplace