By Kevin McLaughlin, ChannelWeb, November 04, 2009, 1330 hrs
With deep price cuts to its hosted business applications, and a new promotion aimed at luring away CRM customers from Salesforce and Oracle, Microsoft is aggressively going after a greater share of the cloud computing market. But while customers will embrace the move, some Microsoft partners are wondering if it will take them out of the game.
Microsoft has cut the price of its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which includes hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications Server and Office Live Meeting, from $15 per seat monthly to $10 per seat monthly. Microsoft also slashed the price of the standalone Exchange Online offering from $10 to $5 per user per month and boosted mailbox capacity from 5GB to 25GB.
Microsoft might deny it, but the moves are widely seen as an effort to bring the features and pricing of its hosted business applications in line with those of Google Apps Premier edition, which costs $50 per user per year and has made recent inroads.
Microsoft's price cuts are a clear challenge to the likes of Google, Salesforce.com and Oracle, but they're also a signal to Microsoft channel partners. And the message is: It's long past time to start moving away from software and toward your services-oriented future. |