Robin Mestré

We agonized a lot over getting the pricing model right. Our research, as well as that of industry analysts, indicates that capital costs are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to calculating the total cost of ownership for an application. Roughly speaking for every $1 you spend on initial costs, $7 is spent on maintaining and operating the application. I think I read another study a while back that software licences only account for 6% of IT budgets - the rest went to server and network hardware, and of course, staff for development, maintenance and operations. Azure pricing is pretty competitive with other vendors such as Amazon Web Services (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing) and Google App Engine (http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html). Now of course as vendors, we need to make a money, so there is a profit margin worked into the model. It is quite possible that by implementing virtualization, streamlining internal processes, hiring highly skilled staff, aggressive and pervasive automation and monitoring of your environments, data center design, and leveraging your own company's purchasing power you can get the TCO for your own data centers very low, but again, our studies show that many clients are no where near the level of operational excellence that cloud computing vendors, including Azure, can offer.

Are you a Microsoft partner? We have this program called BizSpark (http://www.bizspark.com), which provides all of our software for free for three years or while your company's revenues are under $1 million. Once you hit this milestone, you make a ridiculously low payment like $100.

There are also some Azure specific promotional offers:

Partner discount. As part of the Microsoft Partner Network, partners will receive an additional 5 percent promotional discount on Windows Azure compute, SQL Azure and .NET Services.

MSDN Premium subscriber promotions. MSDN Premium subscribers will receive resources to develop and test their cloud-based applications.

Development accelerator promotional offer. Two promotional offers enable rapid development and accelerate cloud deployment:

– Core, includes Windows Azure compute hours and storage, .NET Services messages, and bandwidth in the base unit

– Extended, includes Windows Azure compute hours and storage, SQL Azure database, and .NET Services messages and bandwidth in the base unit.