Microsoft Lowers Price of Azure Service

 

Microsoft has announced that in October the price for the lowest level of its Azure service will reduce by twenty percent, allowing customers to have greater flexibility in assigning storage.

With lower prices small developers can test and create their applications on Microsoft Azure, while existing users can explore capacity options with affordable prices.

This move is hoped to increase the number of developers using Microsoft’s service so that more customers can use Azure with its entry-level cloud computing platform. Microsoft aims to grab a larger share in the market by this move.

“Beginning in October, the price for the lowest level of Microsoft’s Azure service will fall 20% and clients will have more flexibility to allocate usage between various service plans. The change enables small developers to experiment with creating applications on Azure and offers existing users an opportunity to acquire capacity cheaply,” said Steven Jones, a journalist.

In 2010 Microsoft introduced Azure with four prices and corresponding levels, and later introduced a fifth level. Now it aims to target even more developers as it cuts the price of the fifth level, which is called “extra small.”

 
 

“People are experimenting at this level (of Azure) and Microsoft is making it less expensive to conduct those experiments,” said Rob Sanfilippo of Directions, a technology consulting firm in Redmond, Wash. “The goal is to attract more developers to the platform,” he added.

Microsoft wants to become the leader in cloud computing as its rivals are rapidly approaching the playing field. The company faces tough competition from others, which is only growing. By marketing Azure and its Office 365 solutions, Microsoft hopes to take control.

The primary role of cloud computing is to move data and software storage to servers located in a different geographical location behind a firewall or on public networks owned by companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. Recently, Amazon and Google have challenged Microsoft with their own offerings such as uploading and sharing documents and email.

Salesforce.com also stepped into the market with its cloud-based customer relationship management tools. The company then extended the service to other messaging service for customer dealings. Virtualization giant VMware has also shaken the ground with its cloud-based applications suite to fight the Microsoft Office dominance.