Microsoft Offers Discounts Challenging Amazon Cloud Service
October 8, 2013
Grazed from BusinessWeek. Author: Aaron Ricadela and Dina Bass.
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT:US) unveiled price cuts for Web services, seeking to catch up to market-leader Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN:US) in cloud computing. Starting Nov. 1, Microsoft will offer discounts for its Windows Azure cloud service, as well as annual payment plans for customers signing long-term contracts, said Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise chief who has been named as a possible replacement for retiring Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer.
The world’s largest software maker has pledged to match its rival’s prices for public-cloud products that let customers store and run applications via the Internet. Amazon, whose Web Services unit was the early entrant, is more than five times bigger than rival providers combined, when measured by cloud-computing capacity usage, according to researcher Gartner Inc…
“Microsoft has really done a pretty good job over the past several years bridging the gap to the high-growth cloud market, both on the consumer and enterprise fronts,” said Josh Olson, an analyst at Edward Jones & Co. “We expect Microsoft will continue to invest aggressively in cloud and remain competitive in the market, and this pricing announcement is reflective of that.”…
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