Microsoft CEO and Chairman Satya Nadella opened his company’s annual Inspire event with a pitch for partners to invest further in the tech giant’s portfolio of collaboration tools, cybersecurity products and low-code, no-code offerings as well as some shots at his closest competitors, with an apparent dig at Amazon Web Services.

Nadella used some of his keynote speech to thank the Redmond, Wash.-based vendor’s 400,000 partners on their work helping customers adopt new digital technology.

“We want to be the best partner for our partners, and we are investing in your success,” Nadella said Tuesday. “The numbers speak for themselves – partners who bet on us grow faster and generate higher margins. And for every dollar in revenue we generate, partners who build differentiated software solutions on the Microsoft Cloud generate $10 more.”

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What did Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Say During Inspire 2022?

Without using AWS’ name, Nadella appeared to put his offerings ahead of the cloud giant in terms of cost.

“Across our offerings, we offer the best value at every stage of the cloud migration,” he said. “To just share two examples, it’s up to 80 percent less expensive to run Windows Server VMs (virtual machines) on Azure and SQL Server VMs on Azure than it is with our main competitor.”

CRN has reached out to Microsoft about whether the “main competitor” mentioned is AWS. But cloud industry watchers widely consider AWS and Microsoft the top companies in cloud, followed by Google Cloud.

Nadella also said that Microsoft code repository subsidiary GitHub “costs up to 30 percent less when compared to our major competitor,” that using the Microsoft 365 suite of products can save customers “more than 60 percent compared to a patchwork of competitive solutions” and that the Power Platform suite of business process automation and productivity applications saves customers “80 percent or more compared to major competitors.”

Business intelligence company Slintel puts GitHub’s market share at about 86 percent, according to data updated earlier this month. GitHub has many competitors including GitLab, Atlassian subsidiary Bitbucket and AWS CodeCommit.

M365 includes a variety of productivity applications such as Excel, OneDrive, Teams and SharePoint. Microsoft’s closest productivity apps competitor is Google Workspace. And plenty of companies offer low-code, no-code alternatives to Power Platform, including Salesforce, AWS and Google.

Users of Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 customer relationship management (CRM) product saves customers “up to 50 percent compared to our major competitors,” Nadella said. And users of Microsoft’s security products suite “save more than 60 percent when they turn to us as compared to a multi-vendor solution.”

Dynamics has many competitors in the CRM space, notably Salesforce, Oracle subsidiary NetSuite and SAP. And cybersecurity vendors such as CrowdStrike and Huntress have taken aim at Microsoft’s security stack, promising that their products cover any gaps.

Here’s more of what Nadella had to say.