Understanding the Value Assessment of Microsoft Azure

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Microsoft Azure ranks second in terms of market share, not only in IaaS, but also in integrated IaaS + PaaS. Microsoft’s incredible sales reach and ability to sell Azure by bundling with other products and services has helped in Azure’s early adoption. Customers that are committed to Microsoft technologies, frequently choose Microsoft as a strategic cloud provider that spans IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and on-premises solutions. Azure offers Hybrid solutions, which is the attraction point for various customers that are pursuing a multi-cloud strategy. Azure also supports Linux and not just Windows, provides integration with Visual Studio and Eclipse.

Value Mapping for Microsoft Azure (in comparison to Amazon Web Services)

Description

Microsoft Azure

Amazon Web Services

Benefit (Only POD)

- Virtual Machine System

- Hyper-V

- Office 365, SaaS and AD&D on premise offering (Azure Stack).

- Elastic Beanstalk

- EC2 container service

- AWS Lambda

- Enterprise

- Flexibility – pick and choose options. Pay for only those services that you use and require. (L.Brader, 2017)

Cost

- Shortfalls in database and data migration services.

- Good for small scale infrastructure but lacks the availability of options for big infrastructure dev.

- On-Premise Private cloud is unavailable (Customers use it to store private data)

- Too many options – Complex to navigate and select and use.

Price

- Microsoft’s pricing is also pay-as-you-go, but they charge per minute, which provides a more exact pricing model.

- Users are billed a flat monthly rate. (Kennedy, 2017)

- Amazon has a pay-as-you-go model, where they charge per hour.

- Pricing is based on a sliding scale tied to monthly usage, so your bill could potentially be quite high if you’re a heavy user. (Kennedy, 2017)

Market Perception

- “Microsoft’s roster of technology and tool partners is also relatively modest for a vendor with such large market presence” (Forrester - Rymer, 2016)

- If the existing infrastructure is based on the Windows SQL database, then migrating/adopting Azure would be much easier. Traditionally, the reach of windows is 90% whereas that of Linux is close to 2.53%.

- Large Customer Deals

- Breadth and Depth of AWS offering is very large

- “The vendor ranks highest in many fields such as platform configuration options, monitoring and policy features, security, reliability as well as its service offerings. Its partner ecosystem and general product strategy are also second to none” (Forrester - Rymer, 2016)

Assumptions:

- Both contain the basic compute, storage, databases and networking features

- The difference in the common features in between the two services is almost negligible and therefore the customer would get almost no benefit in either case. Therefore, essentially, only point of differences have been taken in the value map

- Most of the reports say that a combination of both AWS and Azure (Non-Microsoft and Microsoft) option is the best way to go. For the purpose of Value mapping, these have not been taken into consideration.

- Pricing for these services largely depends on the hours and/or minutes the server stays online. It also depends on the storage that the customer takes on cloud and the data system (Linux R/ Linux Ubuntu/Win/etc.) that the customer decides to use. Due to a large range of options available to the customer from both the offerings, the price for using either of the service is mostly same.

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(Forrester - Rymer, 2016)

Verdict

The snapshot above is from Forrester Wave Research Report of Q3, 2016. It goes on to prove what we have analysed in our Value Map that when it comes to a market presence, both AWS and Azure are largely similar. This is because of the fact that the adoption of either of the services depends on the customer and the size of infrastructure they have. The platform operation and Development experience of Azure’s offering are slightly better than AWS owing to the flexibility Azure Stack provides and the ease of selecting from fewer options. Also, due to the reach of Windows and deep pockets of Microsoft, Azure has a much larger global data centre coverage. But when it comes to Pricing and Breath of Services offered, Azure falls behind AWS by a margin. With options and price available for a wide range of products and customers being charged on the hourly basis with a pay-as-you-use pricing model, AWS offers the best of services at most cost-effective charges.

Bibliography

- Rouse, M. (2016, Feb 18). Microsoft Azure (Windows Azure). Retrieved Aug 14, 2017, from SearchCloudComputing: http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/Windows-Azure

- Rouse, M. (2015, Jan NA). Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Retrieved Aug 15, 2017, from searchCloudComputing: http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/Infrastructure-as-a-Service-IaaS

- Rouse, M. (2016, May na). Software as a Service (SaaS). Retrieved Aug 15, 2017, from searchcloudcomputing: http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/Software-as-a-Service

- Rouse, M. (2015, Jan na). Platform as a Service (PaaS). Retrieved Aug 15, 2017, from searchcloudcomputing: http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/Platform-as-a-Service-PaaS

- Directions Magazine. (2016, Oct 26). Cloud computing Market – Global Industry Analysis Report, Share, Size, Growth And Trends by 2023. Retrieved Aug 15, 2017, from Directions Magazine: https://www.directionsmag.com/pressrelease/5238

- TutorialsPoint. (2016, Na NA). Cloud Computing - Overview. Retrieved