Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue(forbes.com)

40 points by darylyu 7 years ago | 14 comments

morsch 7 years ago |

What I learned from this article: Microsoft not only considers their Office subscriptions to be cloud revenue (I knew that already), but apparently LinkedIn, as well.

ksec 7 years ago |

We used to use the word Cloud as VM, or Hardware Infrastructure related only. Now every online Services are "Cloud Revenue." Adobe should rename their Subscription as "Cloud Revenue" as well. I am sure Wall Street like a new spin on everything.

While for Amazon, how is Online Retailing not "Cloud Revenue", or pretty much everything for Amazon should be Cloud Revenue.

segmondy 7 years ago | |

well, Amazon gets to charge for hosted database, cache, queues etc. So I cans see why Microsoft will decide to claim hosted software as well. The real reason tho is more that Wall Street has no idea and it looks like they have grown really fast, caught up and passed AWS.

manyhats 7 years ago |

Suggest that readers look at cloud revenue from a business model perspective, not a technology one.

Cloud revenues between Amazon and MS are comparable from an investment point-of-view:

- sticky (unless something bad happens, if you're a paying customer in month 1, you're probably still a paying customer in month 2)

- service delivered "in the cloud" (neither vendor needs a local brick/mortar storefront)

- fixed cost: data centers, variable cost: "things" in data centers

- for enterprise accounts: high-touch salesforce and dedicated contacts

- for end-user / SMB accounts: primarily self-service via online tools

Yes, one of them gets more revenue from IaaS and the other from SaaS. Each of these, and the specific submarkets that the two of them play in, will have different growth rates and potential and affect their respective valuation.

Still, from an investment standpoint, based on the above characteristics, I'd feel reasonably good about comparing the two of them on financial and valuation metrics for the "cloud" parts of their respective businesses.

timsneath 7 years ago | |

This an insightful post -- but I think there's one key characteristic missing that Wall Street cares about still more, and that's growth.

Traditional products like Office 365 may be sold as a subscription, but the market is largely saturated. Its growth is primarily dependent on productivity device growth. "True" cloud products, whether serverless or lift and shift of existing workloads, have much higher growth potential since a large percentage of the attachable market is still unreached.

That's why it's a little disingenuous for Microsoft to claim products like Office 365 and Dynamics 365 as cloud revenue. For many years before the cloud was a thing, they earned that revenue in the form of Enterprise Agreements: which are essentially three-year subscriptions for the same products.

Upvoter33 7 years ago |

I think the bigger question is: when new services are developed, which platform to people develop on?

Microsoft is going all out to sound like they are winning in this battle, but this is just PR. That said, perhaps PR will be a winning strategy...

tracer4201 7 years ago |

Microsoft may have better products or cloud services, but I’m not sure what’s the takeaway here. $23 vs $26.7 billion... okay, interesting... now tell us what share Amazon has vs Microsoft. Is the difference enough that Microsoft is a little bit behind or at this difference rate, would it still take Microsoft 3 years or 10 years to catch up? Maybe help understand what’s driving that.

Author also wrote this article, which if you look at his list of insights on why Microsoft is positioned better, has no substance. It reads more like an ad.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/07/26/why-amazon...

Clickbait without substance.

honopu 7 years ago |

That’s pretty interesting. One thing to keep in mind when thinking about aws cloud revenue, they bill internal teams for cloud revenue. I don’t know how much of aws revenue comes from internal teams, but at least part of it is essentially moving money around.

Jyaif 7 years ago | |

By that measure, FB is one of the biggest cloud provider in the world. That would be incredibly misleading. Do you have a source?

honopu 7 years ago | | |

Straight from someone on a team there. Sorry I can’t be more specific.

ttty 7 years ago |

> Amazon is the only one of the three companies that breaks out its cloud division in terms of sales. The company said on Thursday that AWS revenue jumped 49 percent to $5.44 billionin the first quarter.

> Microsoft said Azure revenue jumped 93 percent. KeyBanc analysts estimated Azure had $1.76 billion in revenue, while Raymond James analysts predicted the number was $2.05 billion.

This is a cloud hosting comparison. In the article they are comparing apples to oranges...

commoner 7 years ago |

Posted 19 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18383553

RickJWagner 7 years ago |

I've been surprised and impressed by Microsoft's charge into the cloud. I really wouldn't have guessed (a short while ago) they could challenge Amazon. Kudos to them.

nixgeek 7 years ago |

Incredible results, congratulations to Microsoft. What’s the combined annual run rate for the Top 5 providers now and is there a sensible breakdown in IaaS, PaaS and SaaS or is it predominantly combined reporting?