PDC brought a lot of new cloud content to Azure, however one great feature that has been added to the Windows Azure portal seems to have been slightly overlooked.

The total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) calculator allows end users and organisations see how much money they are likely to save / spend when migrating or developing an application on the Azure Platform.

The TCO & ROI Calculator takes the user through a number of steps, starting with a number of questions about the application. Selecting such things as the type of business / application, use of SQL Azure and how you expect to see the service fluctuate over time.

Answers from this questionnaire can then be used to calculate an estimate on the total cost and nodes needed for the application.

This can then be seen over a number of years to see what the cost would be over a longer time period as well as a comparison to how much would be spent hosting the application on premise.

Check out the TCO & ROI Calculator here.