Microsoft has added Amazon to the list of firms not allowed to attend its upcoming Worldwide Partner Conference to be held in Washington DC in July.
Despite being partners, with users having the ability to Microsoft software on AWS (Amazon Web Services), both companies are now getting more competitive as Microsoft’s Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service gains a more secure foothold in the IaaS market following its launch last year.
At the time of going live in April 2013, Azure general manager Bill Hilf said that Microsoft will match AWS on price for any base-level infrastructure, and said on his blog: "Customers have also told me that they don’t want to have to choose either a low price or good performance; they want a low price and good performance. That’s why today we are also announcing a commitment to match Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services such as compute, storage and bandwidth."
In April, Microsoft slashed the prices of its Azure storage services by up to 65%.
Google, VMware and Salesforce.com were all also not invited to annual Microsoft partner event.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is set to speak at WPC 2014 on how partners are a necessity for Microsoft to be able to differentiate itself in the competitive services landscape.
The WPC 2014 website reads: "This year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will join us to share his vision for our joint success in a mobile-first, cloud-first world. Satya has long talked about the importance of partners to Microsoft, and he will share his fresh perspective on our business and direction."
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