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In a short post on LinkedIn, Matt Garman, senior vice president of sales and marketing at AWS, called Microsoft’s licensing strategy anti-competitive and expressed concern about its impact on the market. As evidence, Garman pointed to a recent Steve Weber guest post on The Hill. In it, the author of the book and a professor at the University of California, advocates for the US to take action to support competition in the cloud and avoid the oligopoly. In his speech, Weber refers to the antitrust investigation launched by the EU against Microsoft in early April. This has already had an impact and may serve as a model for similar activities in the US.
Thus, Garman calls for antitrust proceedings against Microsoft, directly accuses the company of distorting competition, and complains that these practices have gone unpunished for years. Microsoft is not acting in the interest of customers by preventing them from running their Microsoft software with their chosen cloud provider. Concessions in Europe are washing eyes, because Microsoft, with the changes announced in May, only improves suppliers there who are not real competitors and do not pose a threat to the group.
Instead, Justin Stenger, Microsoft’s senior commercial director of ISVs and games, briefly asked Garman in a LinkedIn discussion what technology Amazon Amazon is enabling its customers to run on the Microsoft cloud. Garman has not yet replied.
Apparently Daddy’s tit sat down. Because the search term “Amazon” in Azure Marketplace shows some hits, these are either ways to use Azure Active Directory for Amazon customers or offers posted by third parties. This includes, for example, “Amazon Linux 2” offered by the service provider Ntegral.
There were also more or less direct responses to Garman’s allegations at the “Inspire” partner conference. Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at Microsoft, pointed out that in difficult economic conditions many partners are not able to combine a large number of products into a complete package for their customers. It is much easier and more practical to rely on end-to-end packages like those offered by Microsoft.
CEO Satya Nadella also mocked AWS – without mentioning the company name. He argued with cost benefits. For example, running Windows Server virtual machines and SQL Server virtual machines in Azure is up to 80 percent cheaper than running your “main competitor.” By using the entire Microsoft 365 package, customers can also save up to 60%. compared to a patchwork solution from competitors’ products, and with the Power Platform it is 80 percent. or more in the area of business process automation compared to the competition. And thanks to the collaboration with rival Oracle announced on Inspire, which is a bit lagging behind in the cloud industry and whose databases will also run in the Microsoft Azure cloud in the future, Microsoft has also rejected criticism from Amazon’s manager, Garman.
However, according to media reports, American partners have often had the experience that negotiating the price of licenses for Microsoft products that are to run in the AWS cloud is difficult. Redmond charges much higher prices than when using Microsoft Azure. A cartel investigation could therefore clearly show that there is an inadmissible bundling to the detriment of competitors. However, the irony is that Amazon in particular is pissed off that competition regulators continue to target themselves.
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