According to media reports on Tuesday (October 17th) citing an internal document and sources familiar with the matter, Microsoft is preparing to make Amazon an important customer of its Microsoft 365 cloud product services, with a transaction value expected to exceed $1 billion.
According to the report, this e-commerce giant has promised Microsoft more than five years of funding and will pay over $1 billion in fees over the next five years to obtain over 1 million Microsoft 365 license seats, meaning that Amazon employees and senior management will use Microsoft 365.
It is reported that Amazon is expected to start installing the new system in early November, and the company is currently using a local pre installed version of Microsoft Office products.
Pay attention to this time point and you will notice that there seems to be the presence of Microsoft Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant Copilot in this transaction.
Copilot was launched in its early form on September 26 this year as part of the free update for Windows 11 and will cross Bing, Edge, and Microsoft 365 Copilot this autumn. The Microsoft 365 Copilot will be fully launched for enterprise customers on November 1st.
In addition, what is surprising about this "big deal" is that Microsoft and Amazon are both major cloud service providers, and there is also a competitive relationship between Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's AWS. Given this, Amazon has always been unwilling to use Microsoft's cloud services.
If this transaction is confirmed, it will undoubtedly be a huge push for Microsoft's enterprise software field.
After the report was released, Microsoft's stock price rose by nearly 1% in after hours trading. On Tuesday, it closed down 0.17% at $332.06 per share.