While it’s only one of several factors that companies consider when selecting a cloud platform, pricing often has an outsized role in the decision-making process. As a result, the industry’s top infrastructure as a service providers place a big emphasis on keeping their rates competitive. Microsoft Corp. put the topic back on the agenda last week by announcing a set of sweeping price cuts for Azure compute instances.

The biggest reduction is being applied to the company’s general-purpose A1 and A2 virtual machines, which are set to become up to 50 percent cheaper as part of the update. Redmond also intends to shave 15 percent off the price on its performance-optimized Dv2 instances in conjunction while marking down the compute-optimized F-Series by 11 percent. And last but not least, the vendor revealed plans to launch a new set of general-purpose instances in November that it says will cost 36 percent less than the current options.

Microsoft’s new push to make its cloud platform more appealing came against the backdrop of rival Salesforce.com Inc.’s annual customer event, where it announced several important updates of its own. Among the most notable was the introduction of a tool called LiveMessage that lets support representatives who rely on its services to interact with customers through the their preferred chat channels. The capability, which is based on technology that the provider obtained through its acquisition of startup HeyWire Inc. last month, supports half a dozen platforms including Twitter, Facebook Messenger and the Amazon Echo.

While Salesforce.com and Microsoft were fighting for headlines last week, an up-and-coming cloud provider called Paperspace Inc. raised $4 million in funding to drive the adoption of its virtual desktop service. The hosted platform enables organizations to create fully-functioning Windows instances in the cloud that their employees can use just like a regular computer, only inside a browser window. One of the startup’s main selling points is that its plans cost about half as much as traditional alternatives like Amazon WorkSpaces.

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