Microsoft’s cloud platform business is utilized by business and tech-friendly users across the globe. Microsoft further extended platform’s usability to data centers, a few months. The platform further stepped in the self-driving and autonomous ecosystem recently as well. Microsoft unveiled a new Azure-based cloud platform helping automakers deliver a next-generation driving experience, earlier in January. It seems like such hard work in the mentioned field bore results for Microsoft.
According to a recent report published by the Wall Street Journal, Azure made astonishing revenues of more than $2.7 billion for the year 2016. This suggests the company generated $675 million revenue for each quarter in 2016. The analyst behind the big numbers is said to be one of the researchers at J.P. Morgan. However, both J.P. Morgan and Microsoft have denied from commenting on Azure earnings in fiscal year 2016.
These figures imply that Microsoft Azure is almost 22 percent the size of public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services. AWS is currently crowned as the market leader for the cloud computing business. The title is given on the basis of company’s revenue which stands at around $12.2 billion for the entire year 2016.
With the present statistics, Microsoft Azure even pips Google Cloud Platform. However, Google earned massive revenues of more than $1 billion in revenue in 2016; thus positions might get swapped in 2017.
The platform was launched in 2008, just two years after AWS’ release. All these years, Microsoft has been overly shy in declaring actual revenue numbers for Azure. But after establishing a strong threshold on the market, the company is gradually opening up. Microsoft did state that Azure’s revenue grew by 93 percent year over year in the fourth quarter of 2016. On the other hand, AWS’ revenue only rose up by 47 percent during the same period.
The credit goes to Microsoft’s skill of pulling people in. Moreover, Azure ensures developers can easily run their workloads over cloud services. Not only did Microsoft renewe some of its virtual machine (VM) instances but also lowered the prices by some factor. The company also began a preview of instances backed by graphics processing units (GPUs), opened new data center regions, and unveiled a new tool for running chatbots.
