Microsoft Azure Price Cut Coming Oct. 1

Microsoft (MSFT) will be slashing the prices of several Azure cloud services as of Oct. 1. Although Microsoft has been quoted as saying the price cuts were not made because of competitive reasons, the action seems in line with the continuing price war that competitor Google (GOOG) has said is only beginning.

But according to Microsoft, the price cuts were made so the Azure cloud services are more accessible and affordable to a variety of customers. The price cut will affect a wide range of services, including Backup, BizTalk, cache, data transfer, ExpressRoute, media services, mobile services, multi-factor authentication, reserved IP address hours, Scheduler, SQL Server for Virtual Machines, storage transactions, traffic manager and virtual network gateway hour.

A full list of affected services and their new pricing schemes is available on the Azure website.

In a blog post, Claire Fang, director of Azure Business Planning, wrote that the pricing changes will make it cost-effective for customers to build “complete solutions” on Azure while being able to use a broader range of Azure’s cloud services.

“As many businesses continue their journey to the cloud, they are increasingly using a variety of different services to build their applications. We understand that economics are a key driver in our customers’ move to the cloud,” Fang wrote.

Cloud price cuts continue from almost all of the major infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) players, with the notable exception of Rackspace (RAX), which has opted out of the price wars in favor of a managed cloud strategy that focuses on value and support.

It seems as though this recent price reduction is aimed at capturing more of the growing cloud services market share—not an easy task, but one that Microsoft has been showing much success in. According to reports, Microsoft Azure has taken a clear, albeit distant, second place in the Amazon Web Services-dominated IaaS market.