In The Cloud: Azure Cutting Prices to compete, Google and Salesforce partnership updates

Microsoft cuts Monthly Premium for Azure Standard Support to only $100.

For certain customers, Microsoft is cutting the fixed rate of Azure Standard support from $300 to $100 per month. Announced on January 25th, Microsoft says to be eligible you must have purchased Azure Standard support directly from Azure.com and have completed a Microsoft Online Service Agreement through their site. Azure Government customers in the United States will also get a price cut from $375 to $125 per month.

Microsoft is doing this to be more in line and to stay competitive with what AWS is offering there eligible customers. However, some do not qualify for the price cut – mainly Enterprise Agreement customers and Azure customers in Germany.

As part of the new Azure Standard support terms, Microsoft is also cutting the initial response time for critical support cases from two hours to one hour. But Azure Germany is also excluded from response time changes as well.

To learn more about Microsoft’s new monthly premiums for Azure Standard support, click here.

Google and Salesforce introduce new integration for 2018.

Google’s first in the series of integrations they plan with Salesforce was announced last week. Google Analytics 360 customers now have the ability to import data into Salesforce. Talk had been made of this last year by Google and the annual Dreamforce conference, but now it has become a reality.

Google’s strategy for Salesforce is to give Google Analytics 360 customers a more comprehensive view of their marketing and sales conversions. The two companies partnership plans to give birth to several other integrations this year.

The Sales Cloud data integration will help businesses understand and give a complete insight on how their customers are going through the sales pipeline. It will also be able to measure and compare the quality of leads, as well as knowing the source of which those leads are coming from. All this without having to switch back and forth between applications. Mixing the best features of both companies will only improve marketing strategies for businesses looking to drive more sales.

To learn more about this unique partnership, click here.