Fair Warning: Microsoft's Continuing Enterprise Price Hikes Will Make it Harder to Avoid the Cloud

Like a misbegotten cable TV company, Microsoft raises its Enterprise prices periodically. But, unlike Time Warner or Comcast, Microsoft gives fair warning.

Mary Jo, today, has introduced some expected knowledge of an across-the-board price hike coming on August 1 for user client-access licenses. To be very clear, the price "adjustments" are for solely for on-premises systems, not for those using Microsoft's Cloud services. Whatever you're paying now for things like System Center and Windows Server, expect that price to go up by an odd 13% at the start of the 2015 fall season. To its credit, Microsoft raised prices by 15% last year, so customers get a couple percentages break this year.

Mary Jo has provided the full list of on-premises products that will be affected by the increase, which include Core, Enterprise, Exchange, Lync, Project, SharePoint, System Center Configuration Manager, System Center Endpoint Protection, System Center Client Management Suite, Windows Server, Windows RDS and RMS, and Windows MultiPoint.

Mary Jo's full report: Microsoft to hike by 13 percent its user client-access license prices as of August 1

The reason for the price hike, according to Mary Jo's sources, is a combination of things including market conditions and increased product value.

Silver-lined statements like these can be turned into a silver bullet.

Considering that Windows 10 will be a free upgrade once it makes a public appearance, one has to wonder if price hikes also help offset the cost of this decision. But, even more concerning is that Microsoft has been on a steady march to push customers to use its Cloud services. A few more rounds of price adjustments and management will find it harder to ignore moving operations into a Microsoft owned and managed datacenter. In upcoming products, Microsoft is building direct integration to Azure on the premise of Hybrid Cloud. Windows Server 2016, SQL Server 2016, Azure Stack, and Windows 10 are a few couple examples. It's obvious to me that the price hikes are part of an ulterior motive to get businesses focused on the rising cost of on-premises operations and the savings that could potentially be realized by migrating workloads to Azure.

What do you think?