Microsoft is once again sitting at the table with an association of primarily European cloud providers to reach an agreement on a long-running complaint about licenses. Ultimately, Microsoft would unfairly sideline the competition.

Microsoft and CISPE (de Cloud infrastructure services provider in Europe) are back at the negotiating table. It’s about an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft for anti-competitive behavior in licensing.

Cheaper at Microsoft

The case has been dragging on since 2022. Then CISPE noticed that Microsoft was pushing other cloud providers into the background with licensing terms. Finally, in 2019, Microsoft decided that customers would no longer be allowed to move their on-premises licenses for Microsoft products to the cloud. To do this, they have to buy a different license, which, according to CISPE itself, increased the cost of running Microsoft software in the cloud by 80 to 100 percent. Unsurprisingly, there is one exception: if you choose Microsoft Azure as your cloud environment, there are no license costs.

CISPE believes that Microsoft’s policies undermine the cloud sector in Europe and limit the options of European customers. AWS also joins the lawsuit. Microsoft had previously tried to reach an agreement with CISPE, but without success.

Now the parties are sitting at the table again to discuss a solution. We do not know any specific details about this. There is no guarantee that the parties involved will now reach an agreement, although Microsoft appears to be willing to make concessions. The complaint won’t go away anyway, as the European competition authority also has the matter on its radar.