Analyst identifies 3 perception advantages which cause customers to choose Microsoft Azure over Amazon's AWS

There is a massive battle in the cloud going on between titans Amazon with AWS and Microsoft with Azure.

Amazon offers by far the more mature product, but Microsoft is growing faster and has the more mature Software as a Service offering.

Now analyst Alex Zukin, RBC Capital Markets Managing Director, has identified 3 “soft” perception reasons why more new customers are choosing Microsoft over Amazon.

The first is simple – customer service.  Amazon’s breadth of offerings is felt to be confusing, and the company does little handholding to help developers navigate the offering.

Zukin notes AWS has the reputation of being difficult to use.

“The issue is they don’t have as developed of enterprise-grade services that can come guide you as a company on how you should architect and how you should plan and manage in order to scale,” Zukin said. “They have a strong catalogue of services but not every company is ready to adopt the breadth of the services and depth of the services right away.”

“Their focus tends to be on features and functions more so than customer service and support at an enterprise scale where you need a white glove service.”

Secondly, Amazon does not appear to be supportive of companies when they have issues, such as data breaches, but rather want to shift the blame immediately to the company, such as in the recent Capital One breach.

“The intonation to CIOs is, instead of helping me either build it in a more secure way or helping me explain to my company and my board, they’re basically saying ‘it’s not our fault, not our problem,'” Zukin said.

Lastly, Amazon is often a competitor to the companies which use their services.

“There’s the perception that Amazon has access to all your data and owns all your data,” Zukin told Business Insider. “That perception does sometimes get in the way of signing large long term strategic engagement in some industries that Amazon is particularly competitive with.”

Walmart, who competes directly with Amazon’s retail service, for example, decided to pick Microsoft’s Azure services when they expanded their cloud.

Zukin says these perception weaknesses are areas which Microsoft could target to help them win cloud market share from AWS, Amazon’s biggest profit centre, and unseat the dominant cloud giant.

Source: Business Insider