Microsoft reported yesterday that Azure revenue nearly doubled in the company’s second quarter of fiscal year 2018, ending on Dec. 31, 2017. According to CRN, 2018 Q2 marks the tenth straight quarter of reports that Azure revenue grew 90% or more on a year-over-year basis.
According to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella:
“The intelligent cloud, intelligent edge paradigm is fast becoming a reality. As intelligent cloud, intelligent edge becomes more predominant, our architectural advantage is increasingly clear to our customers. This architectural advantage helps us address existing enterprise workloads and new workloads such as IoT and edge AI.”
Perficient President and CEO Jeff Davis agrees, saying that Microsoft’s foresight to invest early and deeply in the cloud has led to the company’s success:
“[Microsoft] was one of the first large players in the market to offer both PaaS and IaaS, allowing companies to have a one-stop shop for their cloud needs early. Microsoft invested ahead of demand, which, we believe, has led to the recent momentum. The trajectory looks great for Microsoft considering cloud maturity in the market and Microsoft’s overall brand around cloud technologies.”
In addition, Microsoft execs noted that the company’s channel partners have been key to its growth in fiscal year 2018, following a sales reorganization announced at Microsoft Inspire. “Our sales team and channel partners delivered another quarter of outstanding commercial results, even as we continued to work through our sales reorganization from July,” Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said.
