Look out for a new Microsoft cloud service called Sway

Microsoft has bought the domain name Sway.com and appears to be planning a cloud service by that name.

Domain name watcher Jamie Zoch noticed the purchase and wrote about his findings yesterday on the site DotWeekly.

“I think Microsoft is getting ready to launch the software pretty soon, or it isn’t likely that they would have revealed they were behind the purchase of the domain name yet,” Zoch wrote.

It’s hard to imagine exactly what Sway.com (which redirects to Bing) might be, although it could well be a cloud-based application, which totally makes sense given Microsoft’s strategic aim these days.

The tech giant went out of the way to associate the term with the phrases “online computer software” and “software as a service,” according to the Sway trademark application that Zoch came across.

That’s fitting for Microsoft, whose chief executive, Satya Nadella, has been positioning it as “the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world.”

And business-focused cloud services represents a key area of growth for Microsoft. Commercial cloud revenue, including Commercial Office 365 cloud software and Microsoft Azure infrastructure as a service, increased by 147 percent on a year-to-year basis in the second quarter of this year.

Regardless of what Sway proves to be, whoever secured the domain name seems to have figured that the media would be interested. The phone number he or she provided along with Microsoft’s name and address in applying for the sway.com URL happens to be the number for Microsoft’s international public relations team.

The applicant was right. VentureBeat, for its part, is interested. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.