Major Microsoft Azure Price Changes as of October 1st

Thought-Leadership by Neil Lomax

As of October 1st, Microsoft has updated the pricing structure of its enterprise cloud platform – Microsoft Azure. As Azure continues to gain share in the market, Microsoft is looking to simplify and streamline the pricing of Azure for customers in order to create more predictable long-term agreements and workload deployments for customers. In effect, Microsoft sees this as an avenue for customers to realize the value of the cloud by building more offers that make adopting and/or transitioning on-prem workloads to Azure even more favorable for the customer.

So what exactly is changing in the Azure price list?

Microsoft has made two primary changes to Azure pricing:

1. Reduced pricing for several technologies on azure.com.

Azure pricing for the EA and MPSA have changed to align with azure.com pricing.

How will this affect Enterprise Agreement (EA) customers upon renewal?

Customers who purchase through an EA will not see any price increases from what they are paying today during the term of their agreement. And if the upcoming price decreases are less than the price customers are currently paying, they will receive the lower price.

How will this affect Microsoft Products and Services Agreement (MPSA) customers upon renewal?

MPSA customers will not see any price increases from what they are paying today during the term of their agreement. And if the upcoming price decreases are less than the price the customer is currently paying, they will receive the lower price.

In general, cloud prices drop over time. In addition to price decreases for popular services such as compute and storage, Microsoft recently introduced several offers that lowers costs for customers such as the Azure Hybrid Use Benefit and Compute Pre-Purchase plan. Customers utilizing those new offers will save even more money in the future.

What about customers under the Server and Cloud Enrollment (SCE)? How are they affected?

Due to price decreases over the last two years, the new Azure pricing is likely much lower than what customers are paying today in their SCE.

The on-premise offerings remain unchanged in SCE. SCE will retain all the EA program benefits such as price protection or flexible payment options. Additionally, benefits like unlimited problem resolution support and Cloud Management benefits remain unchanged.

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