Microsoft has announced revenues of $23.3 billion (£17.9bn) in its most recent financial quarter – with cloud again at the heart of its success.
This will be something of a familiar story to those who have taken notice of Microsoft’s financials over the past year or so, with CEO Satya Nadella telling analysts that financial year 2017 “all up was a tremendous year of customer momentum with cloud, AI, and digital transformation.”
Microsoft does not disclose specific product revenues but instead gives a guideline; Azure revenue went up 97% year over year, with Office 365 commercial revenues up 43%. The company instead puts its revenues into a few buckets. ‘Productivity and business processes’ – the Office 365 side – was at $8.45 billion over the most recent quarter, an increase of 21%, while ‘intelligent cloud’ – Azure and server products – rose 10% to $7.43bn.
“Our technology world view of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge is resonating with businesses everywhere,” Nadella said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Every customer I talk to is looking for both innovative technology to drive new growth, as well as a strategic partner who can help build their own digital capability. Microsoft is that trusted partner.”
Among the quarter’s highlights for Microsoft included the acquisition of Cloudyn in June, to help Azure customers manage and optimise their cloud usage, as well as joining the open source Cloud Foundry Foundation as a gold member and an expanded partnership with cloud storage provider Box focusing around machine learning. The latter angle was noted by Nadella, who told analysts: “The core currency of any business going forward will be the ability to convert their data into AI that drives competitive advantage.”
Meanwhile, another company whose cloud arm stands out alongside the rest of their results is SAP, who filed yesterday. Revenues for the German software giant were at €5.8 billion (£5.2bn) for Q2, with cloud revenues seeing the biggest growth at 29% to €932 million.
You can read the full Microsoft release here.
