Microsoft Is Applying Patent For Performance-Based Pricing For Cloud Computing

Microsoft is competing with market leader Amazon in providing cloud services. They are already in price war and delivering reliable and top notch performance is a must have in this business. The cloud pricing scheme differs on performance levels and the new patent from Microsoft researchers revealed a new pricing approach where customers can either bid a price they’re willing to pay or to be quoted a price based on the system’s estimate of the resources needed to deliver that performance. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft delivers this pricing scheme to its customers.

Abstract:

Described are performance-based pricing models for pricing execution of a client job in a cloud service. Client-provided performance-related parameters are used to determine a price. The price may be a minimum bid price that is evaluated against a bid received from client bidder to accept or reject the bid. Alternatively, the price may be returned as a quote. For batch application-type jobs, performance parameters include a work volume parameter and a deadline or the like. For an interactive-type application job, example performance-related parameters may include an average load parameter, a peak load parameter, an acceptance rate parameter, a minimum capacity parameter, a maximum capacity parameter, and/or a time window parameter over which load is specified.

Source: Information Week