Microsoft delivers an inflationary blow to Australian cloud aspirations

Azure is a technology offering businesses of all shapes and sizes the opportunity to shift away from buying, owning and managing server hardware. The cloud storage and server solutions offered by the Microsoft Azure platform have reached a stage where they really have the capability and local capacity to offer a great result for many technologies. The simplicity of set up and the ease of scaling the solution up and down to meet the demands of your business are excellent.

However, just as Oracle have slashed pricing for some cloud solutions to 10% of previous prices in a surprise announcement last week, Microsoft has announced that it needs to put Australian Azure prices up. As of 1 August 2015, Australian prices will go up by 26%. Of course, this is just a currency fluctuation thing as the global company does its pricing in US dollars and would not want Australia to be under-priced on a global scale.

This is a justification that is easy to make when sitting at a board table in America but I would love to hear in the comments below what the Australian market place thinks of this given the technology being used is sitting on Australian soil in local data centres and the set-up cost is a sunk cost. Should Microsoft be driving the price up here as they would have for licensing being sold out of the USA or a hardware vendor would for imported hardware?

On that note, we are seeing advisories that other imported technology is under the same pressure to increase pricing. This is going to make the cost of business that little bit higher in the new financial year that is upon us. How much have you factored that into your budgets for this financial year? Will you implement new technology sooner rather than later to avoid these price rises?

Do you feel that Australian businesses can absorb such an increase or will it push the technology out of reach for you and make you consider other technology solutions? I would love to hear your opinion.

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT services company that is known for Business IT that makes sense. How can we help?