Office 365 Loses to Private Cloud for Big Shops
A bit of Microsoft Partner-sponsored research makes that partner's services looks both good and bad. Azaleos sells Microsoft apps to run on premise in a traditional way or on a private cloud. The company wanted to find out how its costs compared to a pure Microsoft cloud Office 365 play.
Taking Microsoft's recent 20% cost cuts fully into the calculations, the company hired a research firm to run the numbers. For small shops, Office 365 turns out about a fifth cheaper. Advantage Redmond.
Go up the ladder a bit to where the shop needs all the Office 365 apps such as SharePoint and Lync, then the private cloud is one fifth cheaper. This is because the highest level version of Office 365 in the cloud costs more than running that same software on your own commodity servers. Interesting.
This is a bit contrary to the mantra that the cloud, almost by definition, offers savings compared to on-premise computing.
As with any vendor-commissioned research, one must cast a skeptical eye, but the fact that a partner paid for it doesn't make it wrong either.
Have you run cloud vs. on-premise or private numbers? What are your findings? Share at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 04/03/2012 at 12:47 PM