Cloud computing is still in an early stage of development and Microsoft is now investing considerable amount of resources in the cloud. Microsoft Azure is a cloud platform developed by Microsoft and it is continuously evolving, new features are constantly being added and old features are being updated. Integration Software, which is a company that focuses on products for system integration strongly believes that cloud­-based solutions will have a significant impact on their future. This is why selling and developing solutions and services for the cloud are strategically important for them. The objective of this dissertation is to investigate Microsoft Azure in general and Azure Marketplace in particular. This investigation consisted of an implementation of a Microsoft Azure application and integrating this application with Azure Marketplace and evaluating the expenses for running the application. The purpose for this project is to gain practical experience and to work with new techniques and help Integration Software better understand Azure Marketplace. The application is a Log Agent which fetches data from an external source and resends the data to an external party (Integration Manager). Our first intention was to package and deploy the application to a newly updated Azure Marketplace. The new Azure Marketplace was never released during this dissertation so we decided to deploy the application to the existing version of Azure Marketplace. This was however not fully successful. We encountered some problems in successfully deploying the application to Azure Marketplace. The evaluations for the cost of running an Azure application were not carried out due to lack of time.

This diploma thesis deals with integration of Competitive Intelligence and Business Intelligence into one solution, which would provide small and medium enterprises with maximum amount of information to help them make the right decision. The primary goal of the diploma thesis is to define user's requirements for such system and find for these requirements suitable information resources. Secondary goal is to analyze new Microsoft service called Windows Azure Marketplace Datamarket and its information resources, which could possibly be beneficial for this thesis. Gained information will be used to design the integrated solution. This diploma thesis could be used by companies, which are interested in solution like this, or by companies, which develop these solutions.