back to article Microsoft chops cloud costs

Microsoft is cutting the cost of its hosted cloud business productivity bundle. This includes Exchange Online, which falls from $10 per user, per month, to $5. The business productivity bundle of Sharepoint Online and Office Communications Online falls from $15 to $10. In public the company is insisting this has nothing to do …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ah, there's the rub

    So each trial account is minimum five seats, so if you didn't use it beyond trying it for a day you still count as five paying customers. Well, there's a neat trick. Wonder if they counted every msdn seat as five online seats, too.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    yeah right...

    I doubt Redmonds claims for paying users. I Say: "I have a really hard time understanding their [Microsoft's] numbers. You simply don't know what their paying user numbers are. Common Sense predicts that they are getting paid by MIcrosot are pretty realistic. It's hard for us to really know."

  3. Michael C
    FAIL

    For small customers maybe

    Especially those with regaulatory compliance issues.

    A basic Exchange server for 50 -100 people is quite a chink of change. Still, $500-900 per month, (archive compliance is another $4 per user) over the 3 year term of an exchange server? i don;t know if it really works out...

    A shop with 50 people should have an IT guy on staff full time, or near it, or at least an outsourced contractor, so his/her salary doesn't factor in here. Server + licenses + Security + backup, for 100 people, without redundancy, is an easy $15K over 3 years. (initial price plus maintenance and upgrades), and that's likely conservative. Still, the comparrison is vs a 36,000 cost if you include archive support.

    For our shop it would be worse, 15K users of which 12,000 require archive compliance going back not less than 7 years. The monthly costs is $100K, and we didn't spend 1.5 mil on the entire solution, across 2 sites (actually 16, but only 2 have servers), will full CCR redundancy across 4 clusters, Tier 1 SAN behind it which we argued was overkill, and point to point replication system to a hot-site with cloud based MX records for hot failover (a geocluster), and even including backups...

    OK, maybe this is really for 10-30 users, not 50-100... certainly not enterprise class unless microsoft has some STEEP under the table negotiating...

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