An Amazon Web Services VP explains why it's been successful in convincing Microsoft customers to jump ship
- Microsoft is making it harder for its customers to use competitor's clouds - and its biggest competitor, Amazon Web Services, is fighting back.
- An AWS vice president tells Business Insider that its cloud still hosts many Windows apps.
- But she's also reminding enterprises that AWS has a big partner ecosystem standing by to help Microsoft customers ditch Microsoft altogether.
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Microsoft has gone ahead and increased costs on customers using its technology on non-Microsoft clouds. Now, Amazon Web Services is striking back.
AWS Vice President Sandy Carter tells Business Insider that despite those increased costs, she believes customers may still be able to pay less if they run their Microsoft software on AWS than on Microsoft's own cloud, Azure.
She says this comes by taking account of the total costs involved in running apps, including fees around the hardware, the networking, the security services and so on. It also includes Amazon's secret sauce: convincing Microsoft customers to take move their Microsoft SQL Server databases off Windows and on to Linux, the open source, lower-cost alternative operating system.
And AWS is doubling down on efforts to convince customers to ditch their Microsoft software altogether - a case it's been making for a while, with some success, Carter says.
"We see that happening, even before this announcement. We have thousands of customers moving from SQL Server to Aurora. Aurora is one-tenth the cost of SQL server," she says, referring to the Amazon Aurora database.
"We also have customers that are moving from Windows to Linux and we've seen an increase in that," she says.
It's worth pointing out, however, that Microsoft's cloud, Azure, also offers support for Linux, just as the other cloud providers do. In fact, Microsoft recently disclosed that Linux is more popular on Azure than Windows, it says.
However, Amazon has brought on big partners to help it woo Microsoft customers away, too. Carter names both Accenture and Cognizant as two big consultants that specialize in moving Microsoft customers on to Amazon Web Services.
To give you a flavor of the marketing spiel involved, Carter refers to such a switch as "modernization." And the company has dozens of other partners building out their Microsoft-to-AWS practices, she said.
Plus, AWS now has "hundreds" of other partners, she says, that specialize in more specific tasks involved with moving enterprises off all types of on-premises software and into AWS.
She positions AWS as the "freedom of choice cloud," she says. And, as to this latest move by Microsoft, which takes away one of Amazon's big hooks to bring Microsoft-centric customers to AWS, she says: "I really wish Microsoft had focused their efforts on building a better, more performant cloud, instead of taking away the freedom of choice for our customers."