Infosys | Microsoft

And I totally agree to that fact.

However the comparison sheet of the three cloud providers below has been prepared with the intent to understand how cloud customers would want to conceive the value of these end services. Price point comparisons alone will not tip the scales in favor of one cloud over the other but additional views on qualitative factors will also help to customers in making their choices. Customers are often in a dilemma – should I go AWS or the likes of Azure/AppEngine? The following table, in addition to comparing Azure with its cloud competitors will also act as a quick guide to provide decision makers an assessable perspective on the service offerings.

The color coding below is a relative measure of how the particular feature, capability or attribute of a particular service compares vis-à-vis its competitors.

Additionally I would also like to put forward my thought on a few of the salient points of the Azure pricing announcement.

1.       Enterprise class SLA’s announced:

“To support partners’ and customers’ complex business needs we are providing an enterprise-class guarantee backed by a service-level agreement that covers service uptime, connectivity, and data availability.  For compute, we guarantee that when you deploy two or more role instances in different fault and upgrade domains your Internet facing roles will have external connectivity at least 99.95% of the time. Additionally, we will monitor all of your individual role instances and detect within two minutes when a role instance’s process is not running and initiate corrective action.   For storage, we guarantee that at least 99.9% of the time we will successfully process correctly formatted requests that we receive to add, update, read and delete data. We also guarantee that your storage accounts will have connectivity to our Internet gateway.”
Sid : MS SLA Commitment with language like “enterprise-class guarantee”  and “guarantee” vis-à-vis that of  AWS SLA commitment as “commercially reasonable efforts” leans to a higher level of credibility. However the crux of the announcement would be in the fine print .

2.       More in it for customers to deliver with Partners:

“As part of the Microsoft Partner Network, partners receive an additional 5 percent promotional discount on Windows Azure compute, SQL Azure and .NET Services.   As an added benefit of MSDN Premium we also announced we will provide subscribers with resources to build, test, and manage full scale cloud based applications.  We will also provide the Development Accelerator promotional offer for partners and customers who want to quickly develop and deploy applications with dynamic scaling, predictable pricing, and a deep discount.”
Sid: Due to MS’s on-premise servers & products relationships, Partnerships is an area which MS seem to have a definitive advantage over its competitor. Also pretty evident from such Partner specific announcements made and which MS looks at capitalizing on.

3.       Services available simultaneously across multiple countries including India:

“At launch we will have offers available in local currencies for Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, India, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, and the United States.”

Sid: Multiple location launches with ability to transact in local currencies that will definitely take cloud computing to a global market place. Unlike previously where the experience was primarily US or EU specific. I hope they get this right especially with several local market challenges such as regulations, tax norms, domestic pricing sensitivities etc.