Telstra's Office 365 price to drop 20 percent

Telstra will reduce the price of some of its Microsoft Office 365 services by between 11 and 25 percent from May 1.

Indication of the price drops were initially revealed to Telstra's T-Suite partners last week and reported by Box-Free IT. However, a break-down of the complete price reductions obtained by iTnews reveals reductions of between $1.80 and up to $8.25 a user a month depending on the service.

The drops coincide with price changes announced by Microsoft last month for Australian users of Office 365 who purchase the cloud software suite directly from Microsoft. US users of the service received cuts of between US$1 and US$5 a user a month.

A Telstra spokesman said the price changes took some time to trickle down to service partners globally.

The biggest change appears to have occurred for Australian users of the standalone SharePoint Online instance, with prices for Plan 1 users dropping $2 to $6.30 a user a month, and Plan 2 users getting a $3.40 cut to $12.70 a user a month.

Cloud-based storage for both plans received the biggest drop to 31c per additional gigabyte, from $3.95.

Telstra has traditionally maintained a significant price premium of between 40 and 76 percent for local users over the US version of the service since its initial launch last June.

Following the price cuts announced by Microsoft last month, Telstra prices were in some cases double that of the US despite a strong local dollar.

The telco told customers this week that there would be no pricing changes for its T-Suite introductory or kiosk plans, as well as standalone instances of Lync Online, Exchange Online Kiosk, Office Professional Plus or SharePoint Online Partner Access.

Both instances of the software -- sold by Microsoft and through Telstra's T-Suite offering -- are hosted from the software giant's Singapore data centre.

Update 1.20pm: Added final pricing for all suites.