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It’s becoming a rather shop-worn tale – but for another quarter, Microsoft has cited cloud success as key to its financial results.<\/p>\n
And why not? For Q418, Microsoft posted revenues of $30.1 billion (£23.1bn), an increase of 17% on this time last year. Total revenue for the year was $110.4bn, an uptick of 14% on 2017. For the various buckets into which Microsoft divulges its revenues, ‘intelligent cloud’ was at $9.6bn – up from $7.8bn the previous year – while ‘productivity and business processes’ saw a 13% rise to $9.7bn.<\/p>\n
As ever, Microsoft does not disclose revenues for individual products, but instead gives a ballpark figure of their improvement. Azure was the big winner, going up 89% year over year, while revenue in server products and cloud services – a part of the ‘intelligent cloud’ bucket – went up 26%. LinkedIn revenues went up 37% year on year, with sessions growth rising 41%, while Office commercial products and cloud services revenue went up 10%.<\/p>\n
Fielding an analyst question in the earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella said there were a variety of accelerants for Azure, from AI services requiring storage and data, to tier one workloads.<\/p>\n
“Our hybrid value proposition really has continued to resonate,” said Nadella. “So that means there’s a bunch of workloads that are migrating to the cloud – people use Azure Stack plus Azure. So that continues to drive a lot of IaaS growth for us as people are looking basically to lift and shift a lot of their current data centre workloads.”<\/p>\n
Nadella added in prepared remarks that the results reflected his vision towards an intelligent cloud and intelligent edge, from team reorganisation to product execution.<\/p>\n
“Our opportunity has never been greater,” he said. “We will continue to innovate and invest across our solution areas in serving our customers and their unmet and unarticulated needs.<\/p>\n
“With this tremendous opportunity comes great responsibility. We’re relentlessly working to instil trust in technology across everything we do.”<\/p>\n
Highlights for Microsoft in the most recent quarter included data centre expansion, first<\/a> in Germany, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Australia and New Zealand<\/a>, as well as the general launch<\/a> of Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS). Most recently, Walmart signed<\/a> a five year strategic deal to use many of Microsoft’s cloud services.<\/p>\n