Dave,

It’s a benefit if you don’t have to pay as much for infrastructure/hardware costs. We are focusing only on licensing fees, but there is a lot of additional overhead associated with hosting your own data center as opposed to someone else hosting it for you.

I agree that the difference in price between the editions is steep. My point is that the real driver for Microsoft these days is to get people into Azure.

Tom,
Maybe I’m confused. Assuming a five year lifespan on an on premise system, vs. the same thing with Azure (using your numbers) Enterprise looks about the same on Azure vs. on Premise, so how is this better deal for the business?

This is still a huge price jump up from Standard and I am trading in some infrastructure uncertainty for network and vendor uncertainty. One of the big business risks of SaaS is that the vendor can (and probably will) make price changes down the road that you have no control over. Microsoft has been discounting their Azure prices of late, but there is no guarantee that they will continue to do so down the road. Especially if I am trying to price this on a five year time frame as is typical with on Premise purchases.

Or maybe I’m all wrong on my numbers. Either way, I still think that Microsoft is doing themselves more harm than good with their crazy price jump between Standard and Enterprise.

Thanks,
Dave

Dave,

Thanks for the comment.

My point is that the features are there to force us to use Azure as a lower cost option to buying Enterprise licenses for on-premises instances.

Also, I think you are mixing platforms here. Windows Azure SQL Database would not have all Enterprise features, but an Azure VM running SQL Server is the same as any other SQL install.

Tom

I have to disagree with both those statements. The feature limits are there specifically to force customers to pay more for Enterprise edition. Microsoft says so all the time. The way they continually boast about these and other enterprise only features, so they can convince you that you should pay nearly 4 times the amount of Standard is pretty clear. It seems to me that only reason Standard exists from their point of view is to keep more customers from looking at less expensive competitors.

Which brings out the second point, there are lots of things keeping customers with Microsoft (or away from them for that matter), the price difference between Enterprise and Standard is only one item in all the factors people consider. If people are developing on the .Net platform, there is tremendous incentive to use SQL Server, no matter the cost. I could go on.

I have always felt that Microsoft is their own worst enemy here. If Enterprise was 50% more than Standard, I think the vast majority of customers would go with it, but when I can stand up almost 4 Standard instances for the same price as 1 Enterprise instance, the business case for those Enterprise only features has to be extremely compelling, not just a “nice to have” kind of thing.

Also, I’m not sure that the cloud issue really is germane to the Enterprise only discussion. Several of the Enterprise only features don’t exist in Azure currently either. Sure Microsoft wants steady revenue, but they have other ways of getting that, as mentioned in other comments.

Guess goes without saying, but after 10 years Microsoft does not provide support for any products by default. That’s why we generally recommend people should look at moving to next version when main stream support as ended. This way to minimize the risk of having applications run on unsupported platform.