Our own Dan Fay (eScience blog) has a great post about data mining services in the cloud.

“So for fun – I downloaded a csv file of a stream gauge near Redmond into Excel and ran the “Highlight Exceptions” tool to find outliers in the dataset – it read the table, uploaded it to the service and in seconds returned the results – which included the number of outliers – in this case air temperature and it also highlighted in the table the rows.  It was so easy.  I can see it being used for many scientific datasets – even to clean them before doing other analysis, charting, graphs, uploads, etc.”

From the Microsoft SQL Server Data Mining Services:

“The SQL Server Data Mining team is working to extend the power and ease of use of SQL Server Data Mining to the Cloud. Our goal is provide services that allow you to build rich, predictive applications without worrying about server infrastructure, and showcase these services with cool applications that give you a glimpse of what’s possible.”