Microsoft will be the latest cloud company to join the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers of Europe (CISPE) trade association.

First reported by The Register, the cloud company is set to become the 39th member of CISPE, despite the group last year filing a complaint against Microsoft for anticompetitive behavior.

A senior spokesperson for CISPE said: "There are lots of areas where we are very much in alignment so it is useful to have Microsoft participate. This is a step towards a greater CISPE."

According to the spokesperson, an existing member of CISPE Amazon Web Services (AWS) opposed Microsoft joining but was outvoted by the board of directors. AWS declined to comment to The Register.

A spokesperson for Microsoft said: "We are grateful to the CISPE membership for accepting our application as a non-voting adherent member and will continue to focus on building a constructive partnership that supports European cloud providers."

The announcement comes just six months after the resolution of an anti-competition complaint from CISPE against Microsoft.

The antitrust complaint was made by CISPE in 2022. It argued that Microsoft's contractual terms were harming Europe's cloud computing ecosystem, stating: "Microsoft’s ongoing position and behaviors are irreparably damaging the European cloud ecosystem and depriving European customers of choice in their cloud deployments."

In July 2024, Microsoft and CISPE came to a settlement to resolve the complaint, which would see Microsoft paying close to $22 million, developing a product - Azure Stack HCI for European cloud providers (Hosters) - that enables CISPE's members to run Microsoft software on their platforms at equivalent prices to Microsoft's, and compensating CISPE members for lost revenues related to their licensing costs for the last two years.

The settlement was criticized at the time by competitors including AWS and Google Cloud, with Google's head of platform Amit Zavery saying at the time: "We are exploring our options to continue to fight against Microsoft’s anti-competitive licensing in order to promote choice, innovation, and the growth of the digital economy in Europe."

Google offered CISPE a €4 million ($4.22m) "Members Innovation Fund," €10 million ($10.4m) to the trade association for "participating and membership resources," as well as €100 million ($104.1m) of software credits of Google Distributed Cloud to be spread over five years in an effort to convince CISPE to continue its complaint against Microsoft.

Google is not a member of CISPE, but has since gone on to join the Open Cloud Coalition (OCC) which was launched in October. Microsoft accused Google of conducting "shadow campaigns" against it following the OCC launch.

While the addition of Microsoft to CISPE seems to indicate the trade association is truly putting its complaint to bed, other investigations into the cloud computing industry -and Microsoft particularly - remain ongoing.

In the UK, the Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) has an ongoing investigation into the cloud industry. In September, it announced it was extending its investigation by four months due to the "nature and complexity of issues," with specific attention drawn to licensing practices that were not previously examined during the Ofcom market study. The CMA is expected to release its results this month.