Microsoft’s Azure Is Starting to Close the Gap With Amazon’s Cloud Service

January 4, 2015 Off By David

Grazed from MacroInsider.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Final year software maker K2.com stopped relying on Amazon.com (AMZN) for its cloud solutions and turned to Microsoft (MSFT) as an alternative. K2 Chief Executive Officer Adriaan van Wyk says he’s delighted with the choice—most of the time. The developer tools of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service are superior, he says, and he likes its customized client service.

Yet occasionally Azure is slow, and on Nov. 18 it suffered a worldwide outage that lasted numerous hours. As insurance, Van Wyk has moved five percent of his organization back to Amazon Internet Solutions. “We nonetheless like Microsoft,” he says. “At the identical time, it’s been a bit bumpy. The five % tends to make confident if we have to move back to AWS we can do it swiftly"…

Van Wyk’s divided loyalties underscore the challenges Microsoft faces as it tries to wrest marketplace share from industry leader and crosstown competitor Amazon. Venture capitalist John Connors has dubbed the rivalry “The Battle in Seattle.” Synergy Investigation Group puts Amazon’s share of the $14.five billion worldwide marketplace for cloud infrastructure solutions at 27 percent as of this year’s third quarter, down slightly from 28 % the year ahead of, while Azure’s has climbed 3 percentage points to 10 %. “It’s clearly a two-horse race now, whereas two years ago it was almost certainly a lot more of a one-horse race,” says Scott Guthrie, who leads Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise division…

Read more from the source @ http://www.macroinsider.com/business/microsofts-azure-is-starting-to-close-the-gap-with-amazons-cloud-service-h31421.html