Founded in 1975, Microsoft is among the largest enterprise-technology companies in the world and is the largest enterprise-cloud vendor in the world. It has been #1 on the Cloud Wars Top 10 rankings for more than 2 straight years. Playing at all 3 layers of the cloud—IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS—Microsoft is able to address what it calls “the entire digital estates” of its business customers around the world. Since Satya Nadella become CEO in 2014, Microsoft has surged to the top of the cloud-computing industry by combining a broad and deep product lineup, an early and totally uncompromising commitment to hybrid-cloud computing, and highly innovative go-to-market strategies. Those include some unprecedented situations in which Microsoft first helps its corporate customers build unique applications or other solutions around Azure, and then helps those corporations sell their unique IP to other companies, thereby turning IP into revenue.
Microsoft’s cloud services
Microsoft’s huge array of cloud services are centered around its Azure technology for IaaS and PaaS. On top of those foundational pieces, Microsoft has extended the Azure product lineup into AI, ML, IoT, security, databases, data management and more. While Amazon’s AWS unit is the top provider in the public-cloud infrastructure market, Microsoft’s strength in cloud-native databases, applications, and the commercial side of LinkedIn combine to make it the world’s #1 provider of enterprise-cloud services.
Why Microsoft has earned a spot in the Cloud Wars Top 10
Microsoft has done a superb job of aligning its cloud services to the emerging needs of corporate customers undergoing digital transformation. That focus and technological innovation—combined with its unmatched innovation in go-to-market strategy and execution—have all combined to drive Microsoft’s cloud revenue for calendar 2019 to $44.7 billion, which is more than 25% higher than the revenue of Amazon’s AWS for the same time.
