The CISPE consortium of European cloud companies will avoid unwanted visits from Microsoft for two years, checking whether member companies are properly complying with all software licenses. That appears to be part of the deal the consortium recently struck with the tech giant.
CISPE agreed with Microsoft some time ago that it would suspend a pending antitrust case. That was about Microsoft offering its services at a higher price outside its own Azure platform. That would make potential customers more likely to choose Azure over competitors. Unfair business practice, argued CISPE, which includes major competitor AWS.
In exchange for withdrawing the case, Microsoft promised to make a voluntary contribution of between 10 and 30 million euros to CISPE and make the company’s services more widely available to local cloud infrastructures.
An offer they couldn’t refuse
Now, according to The Register, there is another reason why CISPE has put the matter to rest: Microsoft promised not to conduct audits for two years to see if the companies involved are all neatly using officially purchased software.
While that sounds appealing, according to the anonymous sources on which the report is based, it would be more a case of “it would be a shame if we had to visit you more often”. Reaching the deal removes this threat for two years.
Google also proposed a deal
American companies are fiercely vying for European cloud players’ hearts (and wallets). For example, Google would be willing to pay 470 million euros for CISPE if the group continued its antitrust case against Microsoft. Google’s offer would include all kinds of benefits in using its software, spread over five years.
In the end, CISPE weighed up the offers from both players and opted for Microsoft’s, which, in addition to a monetary contribution and flexible conditions for software use in local cloud infrastructures, also proposed to look the other way for two years in terms of licenses for software that—for example—runs in such environments.
By the way, those who want to use Microsoft products in AWS and Google Cloud will continue to pay more. That was initially the issue, but nothing changes in that regard.
Also read: Microsoft reaches deal with European cloud players over privileging Azure