When in a competitive discussion, you need to be sure that you are having an apples to apples conversation. When selling the Windows Azure Platform, you are likely to either be competing with an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider or a specialized Software as a Service (SaaS) provider. At each end, the competitor will likely force a price comparison — you need to bring value into the conversation. If a customer adopts the development service-driven, scale-out paradigm that Windows Azure uses at its core, the customer will realize value and cost savings for their cloud investments, and they will also see significant hardware savings for their on-premises solutions.
I was really in competition also with Amazon and they had been very, very aggressive about the pricing...”

Karin Sondermann
SSP, Azure Incubation - Germany