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Microsoft has a new strategy to win cloud business: A supposedly comprehensive predictive analysis service — and all you have to do is store your data in Azure, the Microsoft cloud.

The service, called Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, was announced Monday but won’t be available until July. It combines Microsoft’s own software with publicly available open source software, packaged in a way that is easier to use than most of the arcane strategies currently in use.

“This is drag-and-drop software,” said Joseph Sirosh, vice president for machine learning at Microsoft. “My high schooler is using this.”

That would be a big step forward in popularizing what is currently a difficult process in increasingly high demand. It would also further the ambitions of Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, of making Azure the center of Microsoft’s future.

Users of Azure Machine Learning will have to keep their data in Azure, and Microsoft will provide ways to move data from competing services, like Amazon Web Services. Pricing has not yet been finalized, Mr. Sirosh said, but will be based on a premium to Azure’s standard computing and transmission charges.

Machine learning computers examine historical data through different algorithms and programming languages to make predictions. The process is commonly used in Internet search, fraud detection, product recommendations and digital personal assistants, among other things.

As more data is automatically stored online, there are opportunities to use machine learning for performing maintenance, scheduling hospital services, and anticipating disease outbreaks and crime, among other things. The methods have to become easier and cheaper to be popular, however.

That is the goal of Azure Machine Learning. “This is, as far as I know, the first comprehensive machine learning service in the cloud,” Mr. Sirosh said. “I’m leveraging every asset in Microsoft for this.” He is also using ways of accessing an open source version of R, a standard statistical language, while in Azure.

Microsoft is likely to face competition from rival cloud companies, including Google and Amazon. Both Google and Amazon have things like data frameworks used in building machine learning algorithms, as well as their own analysis services. IBM is eager to make use of its predictive software in its cloud business. Visualization companies like Tableau specialize in presenting the results so they can be acted on easily.

Microsoft is drawing from several of its own strengths for this project, however, including an understanding of the needs of corporate software developers and many existing business relationships. Mr. Sirosh said that Microsoft had already put 100 companies and universities into the system, and it recently conducted a two-day seminar on selling the service for over 50 software makers.

Excel, Microsoft’s spreadsheet software, is the most widely used data analysis software in the world. In a recent call with investors, Microsoft said that 1,000 customers a day were signing up for Azure, and that more than half of the Fortune 500 companies used Azure.

Mr. Sirosh is a nine-year veteran of Amazon, where he built several internal machine-learning products. He was recruited by Mr. Nadella last October, he said, to build Microsoft’s service. The opportunity, as he saw it, was to blend techniques from Microsoft’s Bing search engine, Xbox product offers, email spam detection, map directions and security software, among others, in a commercial product.