The margins of cloud products like virtual machines are still in the 50% range. In essence, price drops are going to be a regular feature for the foreseeable future. This begets the question – are hosted solutions becoming irrelevant today?
Boston-based market research firm, 451 Research, has been publishing their ‘Cloud Price Index’ for a few years now. The quarterly study looks into the pricing of various offerings in the cloud market to understand the shifting dynamics in the public, private and hybrid cloud market. According to Dr. Owen Rogers from 451 Research, the approach here is similar to how inflation is calculated – the price of a distributed sample of products from the market are analyzed periodically to ascertain the rise or drop in the prices of the various cloud offerings.