Euro-Cloud Consortium Issues Ultimatum to Microsoft

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A group of cloud infrastructure providers in Europe has delivered an ultimatum to Microsoft: End the "unjustified feature and pricing discriminations against fair competition" or face legal action.

With 27 member organizations - including 26 headquartered in the region plus US-based AWS - Cloud Infrastructure Providers in Europe (CISPE) is a non-profit industry group based in Brussels. It filed a complaint against Microsoft with the EU's antitrust cops in November 2022.

That complaint laid out how Microsoft discounts its own software when bundled with its own Azure cloud services - meaning it is more expensive to run Redmond's wares in rival clouds. The Windows goliath tried to settle the case out of court last May. CISPE told The Register Microsoft's offer was "paltry" and rejected it.

The parties recently resumed negotiations, and the timing of today's statement to The Register seems designed to ratchet pressure on Microsoft's lawyers to offer bigger concessions. CISPE told us it used the Azure Pricing Calculator to highlight the pricing disparity at the heart of the issue - see the table below, provided by CISPE.

It shows, if CISPE is right, that although a member of the cloud association - a rival of Azure - can offer remote desktop virtual machines at lower cost than Microsoft, the red-tape put in place by Redmond leaves the competing provider worse off for customers in comparison, causing the rival to potentially lose sales to Azure.

"According to the Azure Pricing Calculator with the multi-session capabilities allowed on Azure, a customer can run a typical virtual desktop implementation supporting 32 users using just three virtual machines," the group explained.

"The licensing restrictions on multi-session use of Microsoft software outside of Azure impose on CISPE members to provision 32 virtual machines - that is ten time more machines - to support the same number of users. Even with lower cost hardware (VM cost per hour) the cost of supporting 32 users for a CISPE member is 2.5 times higher than what Microsoft charges."

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