Jul. 13--For the past year, the tech world has buzzed with talk of the next big thing: cloud computing. Hailed as a breakthrough that will allow companies to compute without much hardware, the technology has pushed companies such as Microsoft, Amazon.com and Google to stake their claim.

As U.S. companies start exploring doing some of this computing this year, a school system on the other side of the globe has already leapt into the cloud. Ethiopia is rolling out 250,000 laptops to its schoolteachers nationwide, all running on Microsoft's cloud platform, called Azure.

The laptops will allow teachers to download curriculum, keep track of academic records and securely transfer student data throughout the education system, without having to build a support system of hardware and software to connect them.

"They're going to be able to leapfrog ahead of most companies in the U.S.," said Danny Kim, chief technology officer of FullArmor, a Boston company working on the software deployment in the Ethiopian project.

Microsoft is expected to announce more details about Azure at its Worldwide Partners Conference, which begins today in New Orleans. Kim is scheduled to present a demonstration during a keynote presentation Tuesday with Bob Muglia, president of Microsoft's Server and Tools business.

"There's no way we could have built up a new data center" in Ethiopia, Kim said, given the local technology environment. Rolling blackouts and slow response times in the Internet backbone would have made it difficult to develop a data network from the ground up.

A data center -- the central element of cloud computing -- would have taken months to build and required downtime to expand as each new batch of teachers joined the network.

By building in the Microsoft cloud, using data centers around the world that the company runs, Kim said FullArmor, working with partner SQLSoft, launched the project in weeks and can scale quickly from a pilot to tens of thousands of laptops by the end of the year.

"It extends reach of technology into the community that can take huge benefit from these services and yet may have not had access to it in the short term because of infrastructure requirements," said Doug Hauger, general manager of Windows Azure at Microsoft.