1. Microsoft & Partner Confidential. 2015 March.
Microsoft Corporate Accounts
Microsoft & Partner Confidential March.
Battlecard At-A-Glance: Amazon Web Services
How To Win
If/Then
Understand customer’s pains, challenges, goals, & major initiatives. Build conversation around Microsoft’s modern platform: Windows Server, System Center and Azure.
Identify and select winning sales tactics and align them with solving key customer pains. Approach customers around specific workload scenarios where you have a significant competitive advantage.
Position yourself as an enterprise-trusted advisor.
If You Compete Against Amazon On:
Then, You Should:
Value Proposition. Customer wants to understand the MS value proposition for Cloud and why betting on Microsoft is a more interesting choice vs market leader AWS.
Position yourself and Microsoft as a provider of end-to-end cloud offerings across the cloud stack. Shape the discussion as development and deployment oriented, which AWS lacks. Focus on the value of integration with the customer’s infrastructure.
Cloud Complexity. Customer is confused between different cloud offers and how they integrate between each other.
They also want to understand how Cloud is a long-term technology that they can safely invest in with a vendor that will sustain that investment.
Highlight the integration between Microsoft’s networking solutions & the flexibility in working IaaS and platform as a service (PaaS) environments.
Emphasize Microsoft’s commitment to the cloud and vision in providing a continuum of solutions that enable private clouds, public clouds, and hybrid clouds.
Integration. Customer wants an infrastructure that leverages the best out of on-premise and cloud. They don’t want to bet on only one environment.
Outline Microsoft Azure flexibility over AWS to move back and forth between on-premises & off-premises cloud offerings.
Pricing evolution and flexibility. Customer wants to understand how they will be billed and how they can get the best price for Cloud based on historical investments.
Highlight that Microsoft Azure is covered under existing EA’s at a discounted price for yearly commitment, while declaring that negotiating an EA with AWS is challenging.
What to Avoid?
Don’t limit conversations to “cloud-only” scenarios. Instead broaden the conversation to a hybrid approach.
Stay away from deep technology conversations. AWS rarely talks about individual services or features, focusing more on its cloud business benefits.
Questions To Ask Your Customer
Amazon’s Sales Tactics
Additional Resources
Are competing project requirements putting pressure on your limited data center capacity?
Are you able to serve your users’ infrastructure provisioning requests in a timely manner?
How do you deal with “shadow IT” issues: security / compliance issues, server sprawl, and lack of control?
How do you budget for peak loads for your internal applications, especially when user demand is highly variable?
Leading mind share and market share in cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), with extremely high penetration within startups and early adopters, making them the incumbent to own the public cloud space.
Rapid platform development with hundreds of new features each year. Large-scale capacity and efficient use leading to continuous price cuts.
Drives perception of lowest cost provider.
Capture new customers through global platform reach with a single, consistent user interface.
Avoid conversations around Hybrid value proposition.
Are you having a challenge competing with Amazon in your account? Escalate to your partner contact at Microsoft!
CIE/MEC
Differentiated Value Propositions
WhyMicrosoft, Azure Trust Center & Azure vs AWS (public)
Disclaimer: The material contained within this presentation is Microsoft Confidential. Do not share, forward, or otherwise disseminate without the explicit written permission of Microsoft. The financial models and statements contained herein are provided to you for illustrative purposes only, and should not be considered or relied upon as the actual or potential income, sales, profits, or earnings which you will realize, in whole or in part, as a result of deployment of Microsoft products and technologies.

2. Microsoft & Partner Confidential. 2015 March.
Microsoft Corporate Accounts
Microsoft & Partner Confidential March.
Objection Handling: Amazon Web Services
NOTE: If your customer has detailed objection escalate to your partner contact at Microsoft.
Innovation: Amazon is more innovative than Microsoft.
Microsoft Azure is releasing new services at a faster pace than AWS.
Microsoft Azure is 56 percent faster in write speed than AWS.1
Microsoft Azure has an average availability response time that is 25 percent faster than Amazon S3.1
Microsoft Azure storage has more than 4 trillion objects and processes an average of 270,000 requests per second.
Lower Cost: Amazon is less expensive than Microsoft.
Microsoft matches AWS pricing for all commodity public cloud offerings.
Microsoft Azure packs more compute capacity than AWS in the instances Microsoft offers, so Microsoft Azure beats AWS on price to performance.
Reserved EC2 instance use above and beyond contracted use is charged at the On-Demand rate.
Visionary: Amazon is leading the way to an ‘all cloud’ future.
Amazon envisions a world where everything is in the cloud, claiming that private clouds are an “archaic” and “old guard” approach.
AWS simultaneously pitches an inaccurately defined “hybrid” platform.
Microsoft (and analysts) envision a hybrid future, and Microsoft offers one consistent platform for infrastructure, apps and data, whether in the data center, a hosting service provider, and/or the Microsoft public cloud.
1Nasuni, The State of Cloud Storage 2013 Industry Report
Disclaimer: The material contained within this presentation is Microsoft Confidential. Do not share, forward, or otherwise disseminate without the explicit written permission of Microsoft. The financial models and statements contained herein are provided to you for illustrative purposes only, and should not be considered or relied upon as the actual or potential income, sales, profits, or earnings which you will realize, in whole or in part, as a result of deployment of Microsoft products and technologies.