Update: It’s official. Microsoft says:

Today we are announcing that Windows Azure will be renamed to Microsoft Azure, beginning April 3, 2014. This change reflects Microsoft’s strategy and focus on Azure as the public cloud platform for customers as well as for our own services Office 365, Dynamics CRM, Bing, OneDrive, Skype, and Xbox Live.

Our commitment to deliver an enterprise-grade cloud platform for the world’s applications is greater than ever. Today we support one of the broadest set of operating systems, languages, and services of any public cloud—from Windows, SQL and .NET to Python, Ruby, Node.js, Java, Hadoop, Linux, and Oracle. In today’s mobile-first, cloud-first, data-powered world, customers want a public cloud platform that supports their needs—whatever they may be—and that public cloud is Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft is expected to announce a rebranding of Windows Azure today. According to ZDNet, the company will announce the new name “Microsoft Azure,” which it says will take effect on April 3rd, which would be during the company’s Build conference.

This would only be another in a line of recent rebrandings from the company since Satya Nadella took over as CEO.

In January, Microsoft announced the rebranding of SkyDrive to OneDrive, which took effect last month. Also last month, the company rebranded Office Web Apps as Office Online.

It’s unclear how much of this rebranding is directly related to Nadella’s appointment, he officially took the position in early February.

As for Azure, nothing on the official blog about any rebranding just yet. The latest post is about a new configurable environment variables feature.

As others have pointed out, it makes sense for Microsoft to drop the Windows from Azure given that it can be used with Linux and other non-Windows-based tools.

Image via Microsoft