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Careful not to go too far in the other direction, and under-estimate the power of an entrenched relationship with enterprise IT customers. Microsoft has become

by zapita 8y ago

Careful not to go too far in the other direction, and under-estimate the power of an entrenched relationship with enterprise IT customers. Microsoft has become the de facto number two cloud provider, and Azure is now AWS's main competitor. That is in great part because IT managers (and behind them, CIOs and procurement) are familiar with Microsoft products.

brazzledazzle 8y ago
I would say it’s actually because they’re pushing customers to Office365 which they’re leveraging to get them using Azure. To be competitive they need Office365. To use Office365 in an enterprise scenario you pretty much have to use Azure AD. And just like that you’re already an Azure customer and are already hosting sensitive data in their cloud. Why bother with AWS or GCP when your slow security approval process has already evaluated and approved Azure at the same time as Office365? Keeping the AD sync stuff under the Azure umbrella was a genius move really. Microsoft understands big enterprises along with their politics and slow processes.
tootie 8y ago
It's because Microsoft took this shit seriously and built a credible competitor. They are very wisely leveraging their popular enterprise software like Office 365 and Active Directory and branding them as Azure services. Then selling everything under the same enterprise licensing umbrella. Not to mention all the retail companies that are in direct competition with Amazon and would gladly send their money elsewhere. I've switched from AWS to Azure recently and haven't missed a beat.
slededit 8y ago
Microsoft got in the game pretty early compared to everyone else (except Amazon of course). I remember even my intern days Ballmer repeating the word "cloud" at every opportunity and thinking "what's the big deal, its just a VPS".
angry_octet 8y ago
I would re-forward that as 'CIOs are clueless, and middle managers are out of their depth and scared'. They blindly trust MSFT. (Not that Azure is bad, but the decision makers are completely divorced from the tech.)

by zapita 8y ago

brazzledazzle 8y ago

I would say it’s actually because they’re pushing customers to Office365 which they’re leveraging to get them using Azure. To be competitive they need Office365. To use Office365 in an enterprise scenario you pretty much have to use Azure AD. And just like that you’re already an Azure customer and are already hosting sensitive data in their cloud. Why bother with AWS or GCP when your slow security approval process has already evaluated and approved Azure at the same time as Office365? Keeping the AD sync stuff under the Azure umbrella was a genius move really. Microsoft understands big enterprises along with their politics and slow processes.

tootie 8y ago

It's because Microsoft took this shit seriously and built a credible competitor. They are very wisely leveraging their popular enterprise software like Office 365 and Active Directory and branding them as Azure services. Then selling everything under the same enterprise licensing umbrella. Not to mention all the retail companies that are in direct competition with Amazon and would gladly send their money elsewhere. I've switched from AWS to Azure recently and haven't missed a beat.

slededit 8y ago

Microsoft got in the game pretty early compared to everyone else (except Amazon of course). I remember even my intern days Ballmer repeating the word "cloud" at every opportunity and thinking "what's the big deal, its just a VPS".

angry_octet 8y ago

I would re-forward that as 'CIOs are clueless, and middle managers are out of their depth and scared'. They blindly trust MSFT. (Not that Azure is bad, but the decision makers are completely divorced from the tech.)