European cloud providers criticize discounts that Microsoft gives to Azure customers

The interest group of European cloud providers Cispe wants Microsoft to stop offering discounts for Azure customers. They get that discount if they purchase Office products, but because many customers want that, it would harm the competitive position of alternative cloud environments.

Cispe, the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe, complains in a letter about the Microsoft business practices. The organization wants Microsoft to change this. If the company does not do this, Cispe wants to take legal action.

The organization criticizes the way in which Microsoft would make its own Azure cloud environment more attractive by bundling Office products with it. This concerns the amounts for administrators who install software such as Windows Server or SQL Server on Azure environments. Cispe has had a number of its customers make a calculation using the Azure Pricing Calculator. Those customers say that in many cases they had to pay much more to use SQL Server than if they were with Azure. The same would apply if administrators wanted to use Office software. That is essential for many users. “European cloud providers' customers want them to offer must-have Microsoft software, including Office, as part of cloud migration contracts,” says Cispe.

In addition to the bundle discount, Cispe criticizes the restrictions that Microsoft imposes on virtual machines with Windows 10 or 11 that run on a system other than Azure Virtual Desktop. On Azure, administrators can distribute up to 32 users across three VMs. On competing cloud services, administrators must deploy not 3, but 32 VMs, because concurrent sessions are not allowed. According to Cispe, Azure costs up to four times as much in such cases, even if the price of VMs at competitors is lower than at Azure itself.

The organization says that it is 'a self-evident competitive issue' in which Microsoft ' implements price discrimination and financially squeezes competing cloud services'. The organization does not say what legal steps it plans to take to enforce the changes. Cispe also entered into discussions with Microsoft last year about the same practices, but those discussions led to nothing.