Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) thinks it can make its cloud computing strategy profitable fairly quickly, while also helping its customers derive cost savings, a Microsoft manager said Wednesday.

The services will be profitable "within a reasonable timeframe," Doug Hauger, general manager for Microsoft's cloud infrastructure services, said at a conference in San Francisco.

Hauger said that the Redmond, Wash.-based software company was preparing to disclose more detail about the way the services would be priced and offered for its corporate customers within the next month to six months. He was speaking at the Thomas Weisel Partners Technology Conference.

Microsoft last October unveiled its plans for Windows Azure, a platform that allows developers to write Microsoft-compatible software that can be stored on and accessed from its servers.

Azure is the most significant step Microsoft, the world's largest software company, has made toward cloud computing, where software and data are housed off-premises and kept on servers that allow it to be accessed via the Internet.

The company gets the vast majority of its $60 billion in annual revenue from software products that are stored on-premise, meaning a PC's hard drive or a company's server, such as copies of the Windows operating system and the Office suites.

Hauger said that most of the cloud computing services Microsoft is planning to offer, which include computing power, storage, and database services, would be made available to customers on a "pay-as-you-go" basis, but that some customers would be offered "pre-pay services."

Pricing will be very competitive, Hauger said. "It's clearly going to be beneficial (for a customer) to move to the cloud from an economic perspective."

Microsoft is a relatively late entrant to the cloud computing space, which has allowed rival companies including Google Inc. (GOOG), Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) to make some headway in this market.

The company has to tread a difficult line between encouraging its customers to embrace this new growth market without cannibalizing sales of its core, on-premise products.

-By Jessica Hodgson, Dow Jones Newswires; 415-439-6455; jessica.hodgson@dowjones.com