1. Executive Support - can you assure me that MSFT will have my back when (not if) the shit hits the fan? Can I count on Satya or Jason Zander calling my CEO to reassure them if we’re working through a catastrophic issue? Because as an executive my career at this company is over otherwise when that happens.
2. Industry and analyst landscape - Which of my competitors / peers use your technology? I won’t be first in the pool. What does Gartner tell me about your company behind closed doors?
3. Competitive - Do any of your divisions compete directly with any of ours? Because I’ll be fired at the next board meeting if they read in the WSJ that we’re funding an adversary.
Cost is negotiable, what is a UI?, and sorry, I don’t care if all of the above is good but Azure isn’t the engineers’ favorite thing. Y’all work for me.
This is a big point that others in this thread are missing. Amazon is increasingly competing in more and more spaces, and companies are rightly hesitant to get into bed with Amazon when they are a direct competitor. Azure is the only other serious choice, GCP isn't even going to be considered.
Silicon Valley might run on AWS but the rest of non-tech company corporate America runs on Azure (or on-prem still). The IT landscape looks a lot different outside of the SF Bay Area SaaS bubble.
I’m an engineer on the vendor side that begrudgingly got promoted into CTO role where I was helping get deals done with F100 c-levels. So I know how these people think. I hated it, left enterprise a few years ago and never looked back.