Yeouch! How are things Down Under? Could be better! Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to peg Azure pricing in Australia against the US dollar in a move that could make things really interesting.
Aussies have pretty much always had it tough when it comes to technology prices.
And things got just a bit more challenging for technology folks there — particularly those that have been using Microsoft cloud services to build and run their solutions. This forthcoming change to billing could have a big impact in the Australian market.
According to this report, Microsoft has just confirmed that it will begin pegging its Azure pricing against the US dollar starting November 1st.
New customers who sign up for Azure services will be billed in accordance with this change, while the company will progressively move over existing customers to this new policy in the coming weeks and months.
The Redmond based technology titan plans on aggregating customer’s billing in US dollars, and then calculate the final bill in Australian dollars by applying Thomson Reuters benchmark rates as of the first day of the month.
The motive behind this move is primarily to bring about global pricing harmonization for Azure cloud.
Microsoft also wants to deal with situations where buying Azure services in one region was more cost-effective than another, often times due to delays in updating local pricing for those markets, which one can image resulted in quite some losses.
Then there is also the case of the Aussie dollar sliding against its US counterpart. It peaked at $0.81 in January 2018, compared to $0.68 at the time of this writing.
However, on the downside, pun always intended, this might make Microsoft’s cloud competition a bit more competitive for local business, more specifically medium and large sized enterprises that may respond negatively to this change.
We shall see.
