By Daisuke Wakabayashi
SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp introduced on Wednesday pricing for its suite of online services targeted at corporate customers and a revenue-sharing plan to encourage other companies to sell the software company's products.
The company plans to charge corporate customers a monthly subscription of $15 per user for a suite of "hosted" software, which includes e-mail, Web meeting, collaboration and messaging applications running on Microsoft's computers.
Microsoft Online Services is part of the software maker's effort to capitalize on the shift by corporate customers to abandon their own in-house computer systems for "cloud computing," a less expensive alternative.
The company built its business selling software to run on individual machines, both computer servers that power entire businesses and personal computers. But, in recent years, it has invested billion of dollars in massive data centers, which are the basic infrastructure for a wide range of Web services.
It has started offering corporate customers the option of having Microsoft run their e-mail, collaboration or sales programs on the software giant's computers and delivering those applications over the Web as a monthly subscription service.
"We're seeing customers, partners and even competitors embrace this flexible approach to the cloud," Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's business division, said in a news release.
Microsoft said it signed a number of new online services customers including Nokia and Danish shipping and oil group AP Moeller Maersk.
The company's software suite is priced at $180 a year for each subscriber while rival Google Inc's competing product, Google Apps, which comes with e-mail, messaging and document sharing, costs around $50 a year per user.
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