Microsoft recently announced its inaugural class of startups for its Azure Accelerator in China.  This inaugural class is unique in that it focuses on business that specializes in cloud computing and which already have products and end users.

With the Chinese accelerator, Microsoft is poised to establish a foothold in China’s large and growing cloud computing business. This market, like many others, is heavily invested by the Chinese government.

The Azure Accelerator comes on the heels of another China focused accelerator, Innospring, which we blogged earlier this year.

Microsoft plans to co-locate the workspace at Microsoft’s R&D campuses.  For example, Microsoft’s Beijing campus has over 2,000 engineers and scientists.  According to TechCrunch, David Lin, Microsoft Accelerator Director, explained the Azure model:

“We have 20 top-notch internal mentors including 6 IEEE fellows and seasoned managers with combined professional experience of [est] 400 years in software/IT/tech. Additionally, we have selected very mature startups who have existing products and users. We classify these startups as being in the pre-A range and we believe that startups at this level of development are a perfect fit for the resources and mentorship we provide. We have high expectations for our first session, and we expect that a very large percentage of our startup teams will become successful businesses.”

The Chinese companies selected are focused on developing on multiple platforms, including open-source. A total of seven companies in the inaugural class are building on open-source technologies.

Microsoft’s Azure Accelerator is located in Zhongguancun Science Park, the Chinese “Silicon Valley”.  The inaugural startups are as follows: Snack Studio, Microcare, Fotoable, Unidust, EachCloud, BanBao, OpenXLive, ApeHills, FeiYan, Atom.