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Microsoft made a couple of aggressive moves this week that are aimed at wresting a greater share of the cloud computing market. On Nov. 2, Microsoft cut the price of its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which consists of hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Office Live Meeting and Office Communications Server, from $15 per monthly seat to $10 per seat each month.
On Nov. 3, Microsoft announced that it’s offering six months of free service to any customers that switch from Salesforce.com or Oracle CRM On Demand to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online in addition to their free 30-day trial. Microsoft also eliminated the two-tier pricing structure with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.
When the hosted service was introduced in April 2008, Microsoft offered a base version with 5GB of storage for $44 per user per month. Customers who wanted a more feature-rich version were charged $59 per user per month for 20GB of storage. Now, Microsoft simply offers a single price structure of $44 per user per month for 5GB of storage. The service update includes new features such as free mobile access, enhanced data import and customizable views.
It’s tough to make apples-to-apples comparisons between Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Salesforce.com or even between BPOS and Google Apps since each vendor offers different price structures, storage allotments and features. But Microsoft is clearly trying to make its offerings more competitive with what Google, Salesforce.com and Oracle have to offer through the cloud. CRM is arguably the most popular type of hosted application on the market today.
Microsoft has a couple of advantages over Google's hosted apps. Some CIOs for organizations that are Microsoft shops say they have a greater comfort level using a mix of cloud and premise-based applications they’ve come to know. They also like the ease of integration between BPOS and Office apps.
Each time Google Apps suffers an outage – even if they’re short in duration – it raises eyebrows among enterprise decision makers as to whether they can entrust Google to host any of its workforce productivity applications. Google, not Microsoft, is a poster child for the cloud: if Google Apps goes down, the reliability of the cloud is brought into question.
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