• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 26, 2015

Microsoft is exploring the development of a paid version of Cosmos, its Azure cloud service used internally for computations, analysis and storage of Big Data services supporting Azure, Bing, AdCenter, MSN, Skype and Windows Live, per reports.

A recent Microsoft job posting no longer posted on the board describes how 5,000 developers and thousands of users inside Microsoft use Cosmos. "Microsoft has used Cosmos internally to process telemetry data; to perform analysis and reporting on large datasets, such as those created via Bing and Office 365; and to curate and perform back-end processing on many kinds of data. A lot of the data used for these various purposes is shared. Queries on this data can run on anywhere from one to 40,000 machines in parallel," reports ZDNet.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, per reports, has said Microsoft's cloud computing business, which includes Azure, is on track to generate $4.4 billion in revenue this fiscal year.

Since Nadella stepped up, Microsoft has seen a variety of changes in focus. Bing now drives Microsoft's ad success, increasing its share of the U.S. search advertising market to 10.5% in 2014, up from 9.2% in 2013, while Yahoo's share dipped to 5.7% last year from 6.1% in 2013. Google owned 71.6% of the $22.87 billion U.S. search advertising market in 2014 -- flat from the previous year, per eMarketer.

There also has been a push to support social sites. Last week, Twitter announced an agreement with Microsoft to use Bing Translator, giving Twitter users the ability to read tweets in multiple languages. Twitter users can choose when they want to see translated, and also adjust options settings to disable Tweet translations.  

Reports suggests cloud support will drive Microsoft's earnings when it reports second-quarter financial results Monday.