On Tuesday, Microsoft Vice President of the East Region Karen Del Vescovo gave some interesting facts and figures about the size of Microsoft’s cloud business. Del Vescovo was speaking at the 20th annual Cloudscape Summit to a room full of 150 IT leaders. CRN’s Steven Burke covered Del Vescovo’s speech and included some interesting insights into their booming cloud business.
Update: CRN had reported in their story that Del Vescovo stated that Microsoft has spent $15 this year on building data centers. We have received clarification from Microsoft that this statement is, in fact, incorrect. Rather, the company has spent $15 billion to date on its cloud infrastructure and cloud services and that it will continue to invest in data centers and capital equipment as needed to meet customer demand.
Nevertheless, as we’ve reported before, Microsoft has been building its data centers strategically across the globe to create multiple data regions for its cloud services. Now, Del Vescovo says, Microsoft has more data regions than any other provider and more than double the number of data centers than Amazon and Google combined.
Some other interesting metrics that were revealed were:
- Microsoft adds on average 120,000 Azure subscribers per month, up from 60,000 per month last year.
- 85% of Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft cloud products, 60% of whom use more than three cloud products.
- Azure is running 1.6 million SQL databases, processing 2 trillion messages per month, and has over 500 million users in Azure active directory.
Microsoft’s cloud business is certainly picking up and the investment in data centers is paying off. Azure does still trail the leader, Amazon Web Services, in terms of overall revenue, but Microsoft’s cloud revenue run-rate is growing dramatically. And Gartner’s magic quadrants report on Data Centers placed Microsoft as a leader in 17 quadrants. CRN notes that comparatively, Salesforce.com came in second reaching six quadrants and Amazon Web Services only reached 3.
It will be some time before we know how this investment will pay off. But with other recent statements by Microsoft that they are well on their way to hitting a $20 billion annual run rate in cloud revenue, it seems that their expansion of data centers is worth it.