Amazon Web Services Inc. is pushing to handle more of its customers’ Windows workloads, citing new data from International Data Corp. and various customer examples as proof that its public cloud computing infrastructure is one of the most cost-effective and agile platforms for doing so.

In a blog posted on LinkedIn today, AWS Vice President Sandy Carter (pictured) highlighted the findings of the IDC study, which shows how organizations running Windows workloads such as Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server can reduce their five-year cost of operation by up to 56%. More than that, Carter said, because AWS handles all of the infrastructure management, developer teams become vastly more productive.

The move is another play by Amazon to move more on-premises workloads to its cloud, this time with those that defined desktop and server computing for decades. Windows creator Microsoft Corp., with its Azure cloud infrastructure and software-as-a-service applications, is the No. 2 provider of cloud services behind AWS.

Carter cited the example of AWS customer ZocDoc Inc., which is a kind of KAYAK or Expedia for the healthcare industry, helping people book doctor appointments at a convenient time. Before moving its infrastructure to AWS, ZocDoc’s application was hosted on an on-premises .NET on Windows platform.

“ZocDoc leveraged a broad swath of technology to modernize including containers,” Carter wrote. “They had a .NET monolithic application that had to be reimagined, which they modernized to a container-based, microservices model. They standardized on SCALA, Node.js and c#. They also modernized onto Linux containers.”

By doing this, ZocDoc was able to boost its engineering team’s productivity by three times, allowing it to shift its focus away from running its infrastructure to redesigning and adding new features to its applications.

AWS also helped the enterprise software company Salesforce.com Inc. reduce the total cost of ownership of its Windows workloads by allowing its developers to focus more on coding and less on the underlying platform.

“After successfully leveraging AWS to increase its global outreach by launching Salesforce in AWS Sydney and Canada regions, Salesforce wanted to identify opportunities to improve developer productivity using AWS Cloud,” Carter wrote. “With this goal in mind, Salesforce started migrating a small footprint of its CI/CD environments on AWS that heavily rely on Windows ecosystem to offer feedback on code changes. As of today, Salesforce leverages roughly 10,000 Windows instances within its build & test environments on AWS to offer consistent, quality and fast feedback on changes introduced by Salesforce engineering teams.”

Carter said the IDC study shows customers can achieve savings of $157,300 per 100 users over a five-year period when they run their Windows workloads on AWS’ cloud, which mounts to almost $6.6 million per organization on average. There are other benefits too, she said, such as enhanced security and lower risk thanks to the robustness of AWS’s infrastructure, which is less likely to experience outages than on-premises systems.

“The bottom line is that moving your Windows workloads to the cloud helps you lower your TCO, allowing your business to be more innovative and to achieve greater business success,” Carter said.

SiliconANGLE’s livestreaming studio theCUBE is covering AWS Summit Thursday in New York City, where the cloud company is expected to discuss more customer use cases as well as technologies such as its coming Outposts on-premises data center system.

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