Microsoft has announced several partnerships with accelerators globally to lure startups to its Azure cloud services by offering a substantial $120,000 credit. With this, Microsoft plans to give good competition to rivals in cloud computing such as Amazon Web Services and Google.
Who qualifies for the program?
Updating its BizSpark Plus program, the software giant will provide a $10,000 credit every month for a year to buy Azure Cloud Services to power their business. Such services include Microsoft’s App Service—a set of tools designed to power mobile, Web and other applications — along with infrastructure services like virtual machines and higher level services like Azure Machine Learning to those companies. Apart from this, the startups will get free software like Office and Visual Studio.
In a blog post, Microsoft’s president of developer platform and evangelism, Steve Guggenheimer, said they had put tremendous effort and time in understanding what startups need to be successful. “From deeper support for open source technologies and tools on Azure to running and managing seven accelerators in seven countries, via our Microsoft Ventures programs, we’re taking the feedback to heart,” the executive said.
To qualify for the BizSpark program, the organization must be five years old and have revenue of less than $1 million annually. Or a company must have worked with a startup incubator or accelerator that has partnered with Microsoft.
The Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant has teamed up with more than 150 such accelerators around the world, including Techstars, ERA and Seedcamp. As accelerators are a link between a company and getting credit from Microsoft, it will help to check whether they are qualified for the credit or not.
BizSpark programs vital for Microsoft
BizSpark Plus is a part of Microsoft’s BizSpark’s program, which also provides credit to companies that are not a part of the accelerators. In the BizSpark program, qualifying startups could get up to $750 a month in Azure credits for three years. Overall, a qualified company can earn a credit of upto to $10,750 a month to use on Microsoft’s cloud platform.
In this competitive market of cloud computing, Microsoft has to give its best to catch up with Amazon Web Services, which dominates the segment. The BizSpark programs provide an opportunity for Microsoft’s core business, as the startup of today will become the large enterprises of tomorrow.
