Microsoft Corporation recently announced significant price cuts to its online services. Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) and several other products were included in these price cuts.
Specifically, the Washington-based company slashed the prices of Exchange Online from $10 to $5, SharePoint Online from $7.25 to $5.25, and Office Communications Online from $2.50 to $2. Additionally, the per-seat per-month BPOS now goes for $10.
Analysts believe that the price cuts were “not unexpected”, but instead these cuts were part of Microsoft’s online promotions strategy - which so far have been successful. "It's not much of a surprise," said Rob Sanfilippo, the Research Vice President for Directions at Microsoft. "The interesting thing about this strategy is that it is cutting margins even more."
Microsoft for Small Businesses
While Microsoft lost its contract to provide services to Los Angeles city employees in October, analysts believed that the new price points would have a positive impact on smaller businesses. Moreover, this latest move will also put pressure on other cloud service providers to follow suit and keep prices low as well.
The tech giant aims to market a new non-standard dedicated services package to organizations with at least 5000 seats. Meanwhile, the standard package - composed of shared equipment usage - is being marketed to organizations with 5000 to 30 000 seats.
That said, the cloud services sector is composed of many more start-up businesses than established companies. Microsoft is crashing this start-up party by moving the Exchange Server 2010 and SharePoint 2010 - the two technologies that support the company’s cloud-based online services. Additionally, the Redmond, Washington firm recently increased its mailbox storage to 25 GB.
With respect to the cloud services, they will be available to a total of thirty-six countries and territories - including Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
