18 ms·

Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

238 points by jbredeche 7y ago

dang 7y ago
Url changed from https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/01/07/microsoft-is-winning-the-cloud-war-against-amazon-report/#119803393bec https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/01/07/micr..., which points to this.
sandGorgon 7y ago
Same in India. Every bank is moving to Azure. Their sales is formidable.
antupis 7y ago
Is this because of AD and Office integrations?
- nihil75 7y ago
  Maybe AD, but honestly it feels more due to strong marketing and relationships with enterprise companies. My three most recent projects were all Azure based, no one could justify why Azure other than "that's what the customer wants".
  - arkitaip 7y ago
    Do you really understand your customers' needs? Because they probably have TONS of really good reasons why they would like to remain with MS instead of migrating their entire infrastructure to AWS.
- I_am_tiberius 7y ago
  I guess mainly because of o365.
- swarnie_ 7y ago
  In my experience yes. between 2012 and 2015 i did an on prem to office 365 migration every couple of weeks on average working for an MSP. The pitch is just so insanely easy when speaking to management/finance types. You can remove so much financial ambiguity which comes with maintaining servers or expanding a business. Every Finance director i spoke with loves being able to model costs years in advance.
- samsonradu 7y ago
  Could also be due to the fact that Amazon might become a competitor in the future. Take the banking/finance sector, it might not expect competition from Microsoft, while Amazon could decide to enter the market, having a much more 'entrepreneurial' spirit.
bazza451 7y ago
I would assume it’s due to a lot of the banks running windows and having large AD rollouts means it’s a bit of a gateway to the rest of their cloud services. You have to use Azure ADFS for things like office 365/teams, so would make sense for people to keep all their eggs in one basket.
- mr_toad 7y ago
  People like to ding AWS for lock-in, but Microsoft still does it better.
  - webpaymentsguy 7y ago
    I don't think people worry about about lock in for either when deciding cloud providers, considering cloud agnostic solutions exist when it is a concern.
  - vsareto 7y ago
    Lock-in is basically a footnote at this point. No one is planning to buy major cloud resources and also planning an exit plan. It was more relevant 5-10 years ago when things were less certain
- blihp 7y ago
  Unfortunately, Enterprise deals are more based on sales skills than technology. Companies like Microsoft tend to have multiple ongoing points of contact with their Enterprise customers such as account managers, technical account managers, professional services consultants etc. These points of contact are (hopefully) doing whatever it is the customer wants them to but are also feeding back intel to their (Microsoft's) sales team(s) all sorts of details about what they see and hear from the customer. Microsoft has had a couple of decades (or more) to burrow deep inside customer organizations that Amazon hasn't.
  - mac_was 7y ago
    What is wrong with all that? That they implement what the customer wants?
Daishiman 7y ago
MS has established business relationships with large corps to a much greater degree than Amazon. They're already entrenched as nobody's moving away from Windows desktops or Office anytime soon, so the upsell to cloud for them is trivial.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
  They made it so easy and effortless to take your in-office IT infrastructure and put it into azure.
- adjkant 7y ago
  This is the real key. The only notable thing is that Azure was built well enough to play ball against AWS so that the sales team could really work. For developers it seems that Azure tends to settle at a clear #3 behind AWS/GCP for most. It only makes sense that Microsoft would look to carve out an enterprise niche. They seem to have done a decent job keeping their enterprise stuff fresh, I'm honestly surprised they didn't go the way of IBM/Oracle.
  - rtyturtu 7y ago
    I think narration on HN is that Google's Cloud behind Azure and AWS.
    - romanovcode 7y ago
      Not HN narration but a simple fact. > Amazon Web Services accounted for almost 33% of global cloud spending, while Microsoft had nearly 17% and Google had just under 7% https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...
      - coredog64 7y ago
        AIUI, Microsoft juices those numbers a bit by including Office365. Yes, it’s in the “cloud”, but it’s not exactly apples-to-apples with AWS.
moksly 7y ago
I work for a Danish municipality with roughly 10,000 employees. I’m not sure if you know, but our public sector has been competing with Estonia at being the most digitised in the world for a decade. We operate an estimated 300-500 different IT-systems, some of them enterprise sized SAP solutions deployed on old IBM mainframes with multiple layers of APIs to make their fronts somewhat web-based (don’t ask). Others are minor time registration systems or automated vacation-payouts. I said estimated because a day-care institution is free (though advices not to) buy it-systems without talking with any part of the centralised organisation. Microsoft has been one of our better partners in all of this. They aren’t cheap, but they listen to us when we need something. We have a direct line to Seattle, and parts of what we ring up at tickets have made it into the global 365 infrastructure. Stuff like making it easier to hide teams-emails from the company-wide outlook address-book. More than that though, our tech-team is trained and certified in Microsoft technologies. The combination of in-house staff and a 30+ year long good business relationship makes Azure such an obvious choice for cloud. Some of the co-municipal systems we buy through a joint-owned organisation called KOMBIT operate in AWS (support and operations is handled by private sector companies), and it’s not like we’re religious about not using AWS or something other, but we’d need to build a relationship and retrain staff to do so.
- polskibus 7y ago
  At this scale, why not invest in your own datacenter, since you already have a lot of servers to maintain? I understand you have to use Office 365, but what is the value prop of Azure to you beyond that ?
  - ptd 7y ago
    One point(though I will admit this is the cynical part of my brain speaking) immediately jumps to mind. If the server goes down, you can blame Microsoft. Even the least technical person can’t blame you for that. If you create your own data center however, if it goes down, you may potentially be on the chopping block if service is interrupted. Self preservation is a strong motivator, perhaps the strongest in a business environment.
goatinaboat 7y ago
Firstly let me say that AWS and Azure are in many ways equivalent - there’s nothing you could build in one you couldn’t build in the other. But from the POV of an enterprise AWS requires you to have serious full-time AWS gurus in-house or rely on expensive external consultants. You probably need a whole team just for cost optimisation. Whereas most of what you actually want in Azure can probably be done by your existing Windows guys that you have anyway, its layered services are much more mature and aligned with typical enterprise use cases, especially if you have existing workloads you want to migrate. AWS maybe has the edge for a pure greenfield play but those are rare in the big corporate space. Google cloud is nowhere, they are not a player in this space at all.
- teddyuk 7y ago
  This is spot on
- peterbozso 7y ago
  Ex-MS employee, Azure consultant here. I don't have any experience with AWS or GCP other than some very trivial, getting started stuff. But I really don't think what you say is true. While most of the stuff in Azure has a very familiar feel and intuitive interface (either on the UI or the API level) if you are coming from a MS background, there are still glaring exceptions and you certainly need experienced/certified people to build something that's ready for serious production usage. I agree though that Azure has a very nice and happy path for most enterprise cloud migration and hybrid cloud stories.
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago
    >> you certainly need experienced/certified people to build something that's ready for serious production usage As with everything else really...
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    Yes you always need skilled people but the path from on-prem Windows guy to Azure guy is much shorter and easier than the path from say on-prem Red Hat guy to AWS guy.
auggierose 7y ago
I am currently getting into GPU cloud computing, and tried various options. My Azure experience was terrible, I could not even spin up a VM, I would get some exception message (in the Dashboard). Pretty much continues my Windows experience from about 16 years ago when I abandoned it for the Mac.
- alasdair_ 7y ago
  > I am currently getting into GPU cloud computing, and tried various options. My Azure experience was terrible, I could not even spin up a VM, I would get some exception message (in the Dashboard). Pretty much continues my Windows experience from about 16 years ago when I abandoned it for the Mac. I'd love to hear what mac-based GPU cloud computing system you are using. Apple badly needs a cloud compute system. If you ever need to do a lot of iOS/Xcode builds (say, a build server for mobile apps at a large company) you'll find that it's just about impossible to get a good, scalable system from Apple. Apple don't allow VMs (not in a scalable way anyway) so every instance needs to run on its own Apple hardware. This led to us having to buy huge numbers of "trashcan" macs to do our builds - they didn't even have a good rackmount solution for high end mac-based servers.
  - my123 7y ago
    Apple allows VMs when the host is Apple hardware... but yeah that's not very scalable.
    - mjlee 7y ago
      It's still not very scalable on Apple hardware - the licence only allows you to run 2 virtualised instances per physical machine.
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago
    Is there any real reason why parent is being downvoted?
    - leblancfg 7y ago
oxfordmale 7y ago
I think this article is comparing apple and pears to some extend. My company is solely cloud based and are using Azure, AWS and GCP, although 98% of our bespoke infrastructure runs on AWS. We could migrate this infrastructure to GCP, as Google has been catching up with AWS on cloud infrastructure, however, I would dread to migrate it all to Azure. We mostly use Azure for Azure AD (and Office 365), and AWS to build out APIs. Basically we are using Microsoft for out of the box services and AWS for anything else.
- cglong 7y ago
  As an engineer working on Azure, why would you be opposed to migrating everything to Azure specifically?
  - zdragnar 7y ago
    Not OP, but in a similar boat. Basically, having everything in one cloud provider's hardware is a risk to uptime guarantees is the biggest reason. There are other, less good reasons too, but that is the one that can't be changed by adding features to Azure (or any other).
    - addicted 7y ago
      Is Azure unique in that if you shift to Azure you cannot also use other cloud providers but if you are on GCP or Azure you can use the other?
      - webpaymentsguy 7y ago
        AWS has better open source managed solutions than Azure and GCP right now, but Azure also has things like a billing console that can integrate with AWS - which is a great feature albeit not being so powerful yet.
  - LilBytes 7y ago
    Not OP but, your global outages freak me out. I moved companies close to a year ago and with that platforms that I develop on (from Azure to AWS). Your global outages of which I can't engineer around at all don't give me faith in your platform. Whereas AWS, sure, service outages occur but they're often region specific which I can build around.
hosanex 7y ago
They'll need to fix their IAM features. Especially cross account role based access management. Most of their other offerings are pretty close to the competition though.
flyinglizard 7y ago
As a hobby I thoroughly enjoy, I help my father’s company catch up with the 2020’s through creation of various online services for their products (which are in the agricultural tech sector). They already use Microsoft stacks internally so Azure was a natural extension. The combination of C#, Visual Studio and Azure Functions to create serverless cloud systems (together with Azure SQL Server, Azure Redis, Azure IoT and more) is mind blowingly, unreasonably effective. Azure Data Studio is also a pleasure to work with and such a fresh take in terms of UX. I simply enjoy every minute of working in that environment with those tools. I don’t have experience with GCP or AWS, but I can’t see how they provide something that debuggable and intuitive without the Visual Studio core. Another benefit - perhaps wholly psychological and imagined - is that I know Microsoft understands and lives on enterprise customers. Azure is not a side business like AWS (to e-commerce) or GCP (to advertising) is.
- sheeshkebab 7y ago
  It’s really not about IDE with these cloud environments, but production workloads. The difference with aws is that it’s actually used to run Amazon’s core business and so it’s super stable for production workloads (or at least has enough of workarounds to get it to a very stable environment). Azure is more of a prototype environment, and gcp is something in between.
addicted 7y ago
I think everyone here is missing the real reason why big companies want to go with Azure (and smaller companies probably should consider too). No one trusts Amazon to not screw them over. The A to Z in the Amazon logo hurts AWS because big companies are worried Amazon will compete with them (if they don’t already) and will use AWS data and information against those companies. MS has a long history of being a provider of tools and not really competing with partners. Even when they did start competing (such as with the Surface line) it was done in a way that has not really hurt the partners and has probably helped them by raising the Windows brand in the premium space vis a vis a Mac.
- leoc 7y ago
  > MS has a long history of being a provider of tools and not really competing with partners. Windows ISVs and other OS providers excepted, of course ...
  - polskibus 7y ago
    What about CRM, messaging, analytics, BI, etc.? Some time ago they released a beta (?) of invoicing product - not sure how that went.
    - thawaway1837 7y ago
      I mean, they crush competitors. Not so much partners and clients. These are all tool makers and basically competitors. And frankly for the vast majority of them they actually bought the alternatives. For example, they bought Skype for messaging, they bought Great Plains, etc.
      - DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
        They ran Skype into the ground by compromising on the quality of the end user-experience - just like they did with MSN Messenger - and the current desktop Skype client is an Electron app (at least this way Linux still gets supported...). Skype was in prime position to be the best way to have free voice and video-calls between iOS and Android phones and the wider Internet (seeming as FaceTime is Apple-exclusive and Hangouts seems unpopular) - I don’t know what happened but WhatsApp ate Skype’s lunch and got bought by FB and the rest is history. Skype on my iPhone X is just painful. I use it to make cheap PSTN calls when I’m abroad and simple things like switching to Speakerphone mode takes 2-3 seconds and involves opening the iOS audio output list (which has an animated opening for some reason) instead of every other app which has a single speaker button. This is but one example, of course. They could have bought Slack, but they competed with MS Teams instead - but doing-so awfully because they still don’t have multi-tenant support in the client. Thing is - I can’t say that competing with Microsoft has made Slack any better (case-in-point: last month’s always-on WYSIWYG editor debacle).
deleted 7y ago
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teddyuk 7y ago
Azure sales are very good at offering big discounts and incentives for getting people to migrate, I have seen many enterprises suddenly switch to azure because of big discounts but have never seen any enterprise suddenly switch to aws or gcp.
- missosoup 7y ago
  Microsoft doesn't sell Azure on its technical capabilities or reliability or quality of documentation. MS sells Azure by leveraging its position within existing enterprise clients to shill it to decision makers, offering discounts that actually don't mean anything once the total costs of projects are tallied up, and misleading decision makers about the proliferation of Azure by budling O365 and AAD and other bullshit into their sales figures. The standard Azure sale to enterprise is entirely shut off to engineers or any technical decision makers. Azure is Oracle 2.0. Stay away.
webscientist 7y ago
Non tech centric people go with options which are cheap and just work -> MS products. You buy windows, you buy 365 you buy Azure , makes things cheaper. IT product centric companies focus on quality which you get on AWS. No doubt most banks would just go with MS products but fintech banks are with AWS - n26, revolut, transferwise (not a bank though). However it's the best not to rely on any single provider and keep your eggs in different basket. But AWS is the first choice when you think about quality. MS the first when you think about cost cutting.
- reallydontask 7y ago
  > Non tech centric people go with options which are cheap and just work -> MS products. You buy windows, you buy 365 you buy Azure , makes things cheaper. This is quite far from the truth as while they do work they are not cheap. G-Suite is (or used to be when I last checked) significantly cheaper than office 365, but everybody wants excel so ....
closeparen 7y ago
I'm not surprised. The coup at AWS was programmable infrastructure. It's building blocks that fit together in the way that software engineers know and love: APIs. Sure there's a sales bro for the pointy haired boss and a console for the IT technician, but the thing is the API. It's going to be used primarily at engineering-driven companies, where "holy shit this is cool" is actually a factor in the decision. Most of those will be startups that flare out, but some will grow up to be tech companies that run very large, very locked-in, very expensive workloads. But an IT manager's only real interest in AWS is trend-following. Microsoft thrives in a different world. IT managers are dealing with lots of different vendors (MS, VMWare, Dell, local HVAC and security contractors) to run their Windows Server workloads. It's pretty attractive to instead just pay Microsoft. But the nature of the workloads will not change, at least in the short term. It's still about technicians clicking in GUI consoles. I'd wager that usage of the Azure APIs is almost zero. Every business with a traditional IT department will end up with an Azure account, and the Fortune 500 is no exception. But the size of those workloads will scale with the number of enterprise apps they're running (each one its own VM). That won't necessarily grow with those businesses. It may even decline, as shrink-wrapped software for Windows Server is displaced by SaaS companies running on AWS.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  Forgive me for my ignorance, but doesn’t Azure provide the same APIs as AWS? PS: I have onoy used AWS
  - closeparen 7y ago
    It provides roughly thee same APIs, but the cultural context it sits in is different. The APIs are there for parity with AWS, not as the key value proposition.
    - mac_was 7y ago
      Any examples to backup up your opinion?
kresten 7y ago
What’s the relationship between Goldman Sachs and Microsoft?
carlsborg 7y ago
But yet the story mentions that aws Q3 revenues were more than double Azure estimates. Does Microsoft count Office365 revenue as cloud/azure revenue?
- ifthenelseend 7y ago
  No. they are separate revenues in report.
therockspush 7y ago
The twist is a lot big companies(Global 2000) are the least cloud savvy, being dragged kicking and screaming out of their data centers. They don't even know what they don't know, and when Azure shows up offering AD which they already use to manage their juggernaut of a domain it feels like home. They haven't even considered lock in yet. The teams that end up managing Azure infrastructure come from a more IT/Networking background. Azure supported UDP load balancing before AWS, and has more intuitive and easier to build internal load balancers. AWS tends to appeal to more cloud native companies that just want to build and tend to be younger. Azure appeals to the familiarity and ease of transition for the 20 year IT squad that is trying to stay relevant.
- a012 7y ago
  Transition from premises to hybrid or cloud-only is difficult and costly for big com. Additionally when they're already attached to MS Exchange and AD, Azure is logical decision. UDP loadbalacing is like icing on the cake.
arsenico 7y ago
Pears to apples absolutely. It is an interesting observation, but for most of cases, which I am aware of, big companies are using Office365 and, probably, Dynamics, which automatically makes them the Azure customer and ticks the "Migrate to cloud" box at IT presentations to the boards. AWS, on the other hand, is being used primarily for either proprietary AWS technology, or just simple EC2s, which are very slow to be moved over to the clouds by the big companies.
mikebos 7y ago
Yeah not surprising, MS is pushing azure as hard as it can, to the point of given heavy office 365 discounts so on the short term it doesn't make business sense to move out of azure anymore.
- carlsborg 7y ago
  Although claiming companies should build their applications on azure infrastructure because they already use office 365 is an argument that will only be bought by non technical boards. They get the cloud they deserve!
simo7 7y ago
Yet I have the feeling GCP is the one which has been improving the most the quality of its offering. It's interesting to monitor what's happening with data-warehouses for instance. It almost feels AWS is having its "Kodak moment" with Redshift: a very remunerative but old technology in which they are deeply invested in. It prevents them to put more effort behind solutions that decouple compute from storage (see Athena) and as a result they are offering a subpar competitor to BigQuery.
- PasserBy2025 7y ago
  Committing to long-term support is part of quality. And this is simply not there with Google products.
  - v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
    Not there with free consumer Google products. Their enterprise level GCP support is pretty much the same as the other providers.
  - simo7 7y ago
    As in not phasing out products? That's more of a problem with Google than GCP itself. GCP has its problems (heard bad things about CloudSQL support for Postgres), but it does seem to be willing to innovate when it sees an opportunity for it. My point is about AWS being reluctant to embrace new technologies that could damage the ones it's deeply invested in. See Athena vs Redshift or Kubernetes vs ECS (the latter having much better support). That's what I meant by "Kodak moment".
    - sp332 7y ago
      It's more that a conversation among top leadership at Google and Alphabet was leaked, where they put GCP into an artificial do-or-die situation regarding growth and funding. https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/google-reportedly-set-ambitious-goal-and-possible-deadline-for-gcp https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/google-reportedly-set-ambitio...
- audleman 7y ago
curiousdevops 7y ago
Forgive me to grab some attention here. I am AWS DevOps engineer in small startup, I am thinking to move to consulting area. Anyone can recommend what kind of service can I provide for enterprise companies switched to Azure as a consultant?
mcv 7y ago
The bank I'm working for recently decided to switch to Azure despite the vast majority of developers preferring AWS. From what I've heard, it's probably related to the company switching to Office 365. Sounds to me like Microsoft is leveraging its dominance in one market to also dominate another market.
- warrenm 7y ago
  One-throat-to-choke is a nice place to be, sometimes, for a business
ak39 7y ago
It's quite possible this data correlates with data about popularity of enterprise database technologies. Microsoft SQL Server/Active Directory "kill it" in ye olde enterprise settings - and for good reasons too. For example, their software has been affordable for smaller, evolving departments (I know they were cheapest about a decade ago among the proprietary DBMS stacks before they revised SQL Server licence fees post 2008R2 etc), but most importantly they have the most cohesive development, deployment and cloud integration tools for the typical enterprise. Visual Studio and SQL Server tooling have let veteran Microsoft users experience the same tools for Azure as though nothing has changed! This was a killer move from Satya Nadela's team. Balmer's "Developers, developers, developers ... " strategy is still paying dividends for this company.
varshithr 7y ago
Where does GCP stand in all this? Are they still an alternative or back-up cloud? I believe GCP is trying hard to match AWS and Azure in terms of capabilities but not sure how GCP handles non-technical aspects.
- dcchambers 7y ago
  It seems like people are really only using GCP for Kubernetes stuff and some TPU processing stuff.
code4tee 7y ago
These results are misleading for the same reasons why Microsoft’s market share claims are misleading. Microsoft counts things like Office 365 and Azure AD as “cloud.” If you look at people truly using their cloud products in terms of things that pair off against AWS offerings the picture looks vastly different. I’ve worked with many companies recently that are broadly “all in” on AWS but still use O365 and AD as core to their infrastructure. All these surveys and studies count such companies as Azure users but in practice they’re really not. Equally the companies that are still mostly not in the cloud but use O365 and maybe Azure AD for some 3rd party app auth are also counted as Microsoft Cloud users when they’re really not. As they say 82% of statistics are mostly made up.
- w0m 7y ago
  they're competing in different-but-overlapping markets. marketing spin can say whatever story you want on both sides as it's competitive.
- Analemma_ 7y ago
  > Microsoft counts things like Office 365 and Azure AD as “cloud.” Please stop repeating this. Microsoft started reporting Office 365 revenue separately from Azure revenue years ago.
  - ifthenelseend 7y ago
    Just checked the report and this is true. Microsoft haters becomes really annoying with all their lies.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Microsoft counts things like Office 365 and Azure AD as “cloud.” Even if that was true, AWS also counts their parallel but far less complete services.
okareaman 7y ago
I'm a retired programmer and now Uber driver in Silicon Valley so I often talk shop with my riders. I was giving a guy a ride to make a pitch for his product to a Japanese company. He related that his biggest challenge so far was when Walmart licensed his product and they insisted it absolutely could not be hosted on AWS so he had to transfer over to Azure. Obviously Amazon and Walmart are competitors and that might apply in many other situations.
- stevewodil 7y ago
  I feel like you should start a YouTube channel. In that area I'm sure you have a lot of interesting conversations with technical people, and entrepreneurs trying to make it
  - hnrodey 7y ago
    At a minimum I would follow his Twitter account if he's sharing stories.
    - okareaman 7y ago
      Sometimes people are careless and I get inside information but I'm smart enough to know that and not act on it.
  - okareaman 7y ago
    Some passengers use the ride as a confessional or just to vent. I feel it would be wrong to share too much about what they say. It seems like an unwritten rule. I don't have a front/rear view dash cam like a lot of drivers advise because I appreciate these conversations and don't want to inhibit them.
    - stevewodil 7y ago
      Of course you would get their permission to record them!
soverance 7y ago
Man the amount of opinions and misinformation in this thread is staggering.
shanemlk 7y ago
I've only used Azure so far. I can see why a big company would choose Azure. Although as we move further into the tech era, we're going to see a decline in the size of companies. Internet services will continue to make it easier for small companies to offload pieces of work to other small companies. They'll get good quality results for reasonable costs. Then soon, these small companies are producing big company results, shaving off big company profits. Welcome in the hunter gather era of computation. Bottom line, if Azure stays around, it's just going to become what AWS already is.
runeks 7y ago
I think Azure is so relatively popular because Microsoft is the only consultant company who owns a cloud. Generally speaking, for any piece of software -- cloud infrastructure, (managed) database, CRM system, operating system, office suite -- Microsoft has it and has consultants you can hire to help implement it in your company. That's why Microsoft is doing well, as car as I can tell.
- fred_is_fred 7y ago
  Two other reasons: 1) They have the consultants and more than likely an existing business relationship for Windows, Exchange, etc. 2) They are not likely to compete with you - Amazon is trying to compete with everyone and nobody wants to fund their own demise.

238 points by jbredeche 7y ago

dang 7y ago

Url changed from https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/01/07/microsoft-is-winning-the-cloud-war-against-amazon-report/#119803393bec https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/01/07/micr..., which points to this.

sandGorgon 7y ago

Same in India. Every bank is moving to Azure. Their sales is formidable.

antupis 7y ago

Is this because of AD and Office integrations?

nihil75 7y ago
Maybe AD, but honestly it feels more due to strong marketing and relationships with enterprise companies. My three most recent projects were all Azure based, no one could justify why Azure other than "that's what the customer wants".
- arkitaip 7y ago
  Do you really understand your customers' needs? Because they probably have TONS of really good reasons why they would like to remain with MS instead of migrating their entire infrastructure to AWS.
I_am_tiberius 7y ago
I guess mainly because of o365.
swarnie_ 7y ago
In my experience yes. between 2012 and 2015 i did an on prem to office 365 migration every couple of weeks on average working for an MSP. The pitch is just so insanely easy when speaking to management/finance types. You can remove so much financial ambiguity which comes with maintaining servers or expanding a business. Every Finance director i spoke with loves being able to model costs years in advance.
samsonradu 7y ago
Could also be due to the fact that Amazon might become a competitor in the future. Take the banking/finance sector, it might not expect competition from Microsoft, while Amazon could decide to enter the market, having a much more 'entrepreneurial' spirit.

bazza451 7y ago

I would assume it’s due to a lot of the banks running windows and having large AD rollouts means it’s a bit of a gateway to the rest of their cloud services. You have to use Azure ADFS for things like office 365/teams, so would make sense for people to keep all their eggs in one basket.

mr_toad 7y ago
People like to ding AWS for lock-in, but Microsoft still does it better.
- webpaymentsguy 7y ago
  I don't think people worry about about lock in for either when deciding cloud providers, considering cloud agnostic solutions exist when it is a concern.
- vsareto 7y ago
  Lock-in is basically a footnote at this point. No one is planning to buy major cloud resources and also planning an exit plan. It was more relevant 5-10 years ago when things were less certain
blihp 7y ago
Unfortunately, Enterprise deals are more based on sales skills than technology. Companies like Microsoft tend to have multiple ongoing points of contact with their Enterprise customers such as account managers, technical account managers, professional services consultants etc. These points of contact are (hopefully) doing whatever it is the customer wants them to but are also feeding back intel to their (Microsoft's) sales team(s) all sorts of details about what they see and hear from the customer. Microsoft has had a couple of decades (or more) to burrow deep inside customer organizations that Amazon hasn't.
- mac_was 7y ago
  What is wrong with all that? That they implement what the customer wants?

Daishiman 7y ago

MS has established business relationships with large corps to a much greater degree than Amazon. They're already entrenched as nobody's moving away from Windows desktops or Office anytime soon, so the upsell to cloud for them is trivial.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
They made it so easy and effortless to take your in-office IT infrastructure and put it into azure.
adjkant 7y ago
This is the real key. The only notable thing is that Azure was built well enough to play ball against AWS so that the sales team could really work. For developers it seems that Azure tends to settle at a clear #3 behind AWS/GCP for most. It only makes sense that Microsoft would look to carve out an enterprise niche. They seem to have done a decent job keeping their enterprise stuff fresh, I'm honestly surprised they didn't go the way of IBM/Oracle.
- rtyturtu 7y ago
  I think narration on HN is that Google's Cloud behind Azure and AWS.
  - romanovcode 7y ago
    Not HN narration but a simple fact. > Amazon Web Services accounted for almost 33% of global cloud spending, while Microsoft had nearly 17% and Google had just under 7% https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...
    - coredog64 7y ago
      AIUI, Microsoft juices those numbers a bit by including Office365. Yes, it’s in the “cloud”, but it’s not exactly apples-to-apples with AWS.

moksly 7y ago

I work for a Danish municipality with roughly 10,000 employees. I’m not sure if you know, but our public sector has been competing with Estonia at being the most digitised in the world for a decade. We operate an estimated 300-500 different IT-systems, some of them enterprise sized SAP solutions deployed on old IBM mainframes with multiple layers of APIs to make their fronts somewhat web-based (don’t ask). Others are minor time registration systems or automated vacation-payouts. I said estimated because a day-care institution is free (though advices not to) buy it-systems without talking with any part of the centralised organisation. Microsoft has been one of our better partners in all of this. They aren’t cheap, but they listen to us when we need something. We have a direct line to Seattle, and parts of what we ring up at tickets have made it into the global 365 infrastructure. Stuff like making it easier to hide teams-emails from the company-wide outlook address-book. More than that though, our tech-team is trained and certified in Microsoft technologies. The combination of in-house staff and a 30+ year long good business relationship makes Azure such an obvious choice for cloud. Some of the co-municipal systems we buy through a joint-owned organisation called KOMBIT operate in AWS (support and operations is handled by private sector companies), and it’s not like we’re religious about not using AWS or something other, but we’d need to build a relationship and retrain staff to do so.

polskibus 7y ago
At this scale, why not invest in your own datacenter, since you already have a lot of servers to maintain? I understand you have to use Office 365, but what is the value prop of Azure to you beyond that ?
- ptd 7y ago
  One point(though I will admit this is the cynical part of my brain speaking) immediately jumps to mind. If the server goes down, you can blame Microsoft. Even the least technical person can’t blame you for that. If you create your own data center however, if it goes down, you may potentially be on the chopping block if service is interrupted. Self preservation is a strong motivator, perhaps the strongest in a business environment.

goatinaboat 7y ago

Firstly let me say that AWS and Azure are in many ways equivalent - there’s nothing you could build in one you couldn’t build in the other. But from the POV of an enterprise AWS requires you to have serious full-time AWS gurus in-house or rely on expensive external consultants. You probably need a whole team just for cost optimisation. Whereas most of what you actually want in Azure can probably be done by your existing Windows guys that you have anyway, its layered services are much more mature and aligned with typical enterprise use cases, especially if you have existing workloads you want to migrate. AWS maybe has the edge for a pure greenfield play but those are rare in the big corporate space. Google cloud is nowhere, they are not a player in this space at all.

teddyuk 7y ago
This is spot on
peterbozso 7y ago
Ex-MS employee, Azure consultant here. I don't have any experience with AWS or GCP other than some very trivial, getting started stuff. But I really don't think what you say is true. While most of the stuff in Azure has a very familiar feel and intuitive interface (either on the UI or the API level) if you are coming from a MS background, there are still glaring exceptions and you certainly need experienced/certified people to build something that's ready for serious production usage. I agree though that Azure has a very nice and happy path for most enterprise cloud migration and hybrid cloud stories.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  >> you certainly need experienced/certified people to build something that's ready for serious production usage As with everything else really...
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  Yes you always need skilled people but the path from on-prem Windows guy to Azure guy is much shorter and easier than the path from say on-prem Red Hat guy to AWS guy.

auggierose 7y ago

I am currently getting into GPU cloud computing, and tried various options. My Azure experience was terrible, I could not even spin up a VM, I would get some exception message (in the Dashboard). Pretty much continues my Windows experience from about 16 years ago when I abandoned it for the Mac.

alasdair_ 7y ago
> I am currently getting into GPU cloud computing, and tried various options. My Azure experience was terrible, I could not even spin up a VM, I would get some exception message (in the Dashboard). Pretty much continues my Windows experience from about 16 years ago when I abandoned it for the Mac. I'd love to hear what mac-based GPU cloud computing system you are using. Apple badly needs a cloud compute system. If you ever need to do a lot of iOS/Xcode builds (say, a build server for mobile apps at a large company) you'll find that it's just about impossible to get a good, scalable system from Apple. Apple don't allow VMs (not in a scalable way anyway) so every instance needs to run on its own Apple hardware. This led to us having to buy huge numbers of "trashcan" macs to do our builds - they didn't even have a good rackmount solution for high end mac-based servers.
- my123 7y ago
  Apple allows VMs when the host is Apple hardware... but yeah that's not very scalable.
  - mjlee 7y ago
    It's still not very scalable on Apple hardware - the licence only allows you to run 2 virtualised instances per physical machine.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  Is there any real reason why parent is being downvoted?
  - leblancfg 7y ago

oxfordmale 7y ago

I think this article is comparing apple and pears to some extend. My company is solely cloud based and are using Azure, AWS and GCP, although 98% of our bespoke infrastructure runs on AWS. We could migrate this infrastructure to GCP, as Google has been catching up with AWS on cloud infrastructure, however, I would dread to migrate it all to Azure. We mostly use Azure for Azure AD (and Office 365), and AWS to build out APIs. Basically we are using Microsoft for out of the box services and AWS for anything else.

cglong 7y ago
As an engineer working on Azure, why would you be opposed to migrating everything to Azure specifically?
- zdragnar 7y ago
  Not OP, but in a similar boat. Basically, having everything in one cloud provider's hardware is a risk to uptime guarantees is the biggest reason. There are other, less good reasons too, but that is the one that can't be changed by adding features to Azure (or any other).
  - addicted 7y ago
    Is Azure unique in that if you shift to Azure you cannot also use other cloud providers but if you are on GCP or Azure you can use the other?
    - webpaymentsguy 7y ago
      AWS has better open source managed solutions than Azure and GCP right now, but Azure also has things like a billing console that can integrate with AWS - which is a great feature albeit not being so powerful yet.
- LilBytes 7y ago
  Not OP but, your global outages freak me out. I moved companies close to a year ago and with that platforms that I develop on (from Azure to AWS). Your global outages of which I can't engineer around at all don't give me faith in your platform. Whereas AWS, sure, service outages occur but they're often region specific which I can build around.

hosanex 7y ago

They'll need to fix their IAM features. Especially cross account role based access management. Most of their other offerings are pretty close to the competition though.

flyinglizard 7y ago

As a hobby I thoroughly enjoy, I help my father’s company catch up with the 2020’s through creation of various online services for their products (which are in the agricultural tech sector). They already use Microsoft stacks internally so Azure was a natural extension. The combination of C#, Visual Studio and Azure Functions to create serverless cloud systems (together with Azure SQL Server, Azure Redis, Azure IoT and more) is mind blowingly, unreasonably effective. Azure Data Studio is also a pleasure to work with and such a fresh take in terms of UX. I simply enjoy every minute of working in that environment with those tools. I don’t have experience with GCP or AWS, but I can’t see how they provide something that debuggable and intuitive without the Visual Studio core. Another benefit - perhaps wholly psychological and imagined - is that I know Microsoft understands and lives on enterprise customers. Azure is not a side business like AWS (to e-commerce) or GCP (to advertising) is.

sheeshkebab 7y ago
It’s really not about IDE with these cloud environments, but production workloads. The difference with aws is that it’s actually used to run Amazon’s core business and so it’s super stable for production workloads (or at least has enough of workarounds to get it to a very stable environment). Azure is more of a prototype environment, and gcp is something in between.

addicted 7y ago

I think everyone here is missing the real reason why big companies want to go with Azure (and smaller companies probably should consider too). No one trusts Amazon to not screw them over. The A to Z in the Amazon logo hurts AWS because big companies are worried Amazon will compete with them (if they don’t already) and will use AWS data and information against those companies. MS has a long history of being a provider of tools and not really competing with partners. Even when they did start competing (such as with the Surface line) it was done in a way that has not really hurt the partners and has probably helped them by raising the Windows brand in the premium space vis a vis a Mac.

leoc 7y ago
> MS has a long history of being a provider of tools and not really competing with partners. Windows ISVs and other OS providers excepted, of course ...
- polskibus 7y ago
  What about CRM, messaging, analytics, BI, etc.? Some time ago they released a beta (?) of invoicing product - not sure how that went.
  - thawaway1837 7y ago
    I mean, they crush competitors. Not so much partners and clients. These are all tool makers and basically competitors. And frankly for the vast majority of them they actually bought the alternatives. For example, they bought Skype for messaging, they bought Great Plains, etc.
    - DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
      They ran Skype into the ground by compromising on the quality of the end user-experience - just like they did with MSN Messenger - and the current desktop Skype client is an Electron app (at least this way Linux still gets supported...). Skype was in prime position to be the best way to have free voice and video-calls between iOS and Android phones and the wider Internet (seeming as FaceTime is Apple-exclusive and Hangouts seems unpopular) - I don’t know what happened but WhatsApp ate Skype’s lunch and got bought by FB and the rest is history. Skype on my iPhone X is just painful. I use it to make cheap PSTN calls when I’m abroad and simple things like switching to Speakerphone mode takes 2-3 seconds and involves opening the iOS audio output list (which has an animated opening for some reason) instead of every other app which has a single speaker button. This is but one example, of course. They could have bought Slack, but they competed with MS Teams instead - but doing-so awfully because they still don’t have multi-tenant support in the client. Thing is - I can’t say that competing with Microsoft has made Slack any better (case-in-point: last month’s always-on WYSIWYG editor debacle).

deleted 7y ago

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teddyuk 7y ago

Azure sales are very good at offering big discounts and incentives for getting people to migrate, I have seen many enterprises suddenly switch to azure because of big discounts but have never seen any enterprise suddenly switch to aws or gcp.

missosoup 7y ago
Microsoft doesn't sell Azure on its technical capabilities or reliability or quality of documentation. MS sells Azure by leveraging its position within existing enterprise clients to shill it to decision makers, offering discounts that actually don't mean anything once the total costs of projects are tallied up, and misleading decision makers about the proliferation of Azure by budling O365 and AAD and other bullshit into their sales figures. The standard Azure sale to enterprise is entirely shut off to engineers or any technical decision makers. Azure is Oracle 2.0. Stay away.

webscientist 7y ago

Non tech centric people go with options which are cheap and just work -> MS products. You buy windows, you buy 365 you buy Azure , makes things cheaper. IT product centric companies focus on quality which you get on AWS. No doubt most banks would just go with MS products but fintech banks are with AWS - n26, revolut, transferwise (not a bank though). However it's the best not to rely on any single provider and keep your eggs in different basket. But AWS is the first choice when you think about quality. MS the first when you think about cost cutting.

reallydontask 7y ago
> Non tech centric people go with options which are cheap and just work -> MS products. You buy windows, you buy 365 you buy Azure , makes things cheaper. This is quite far from the truth as while they do work they are not cheap. G-Suite is (or used to be when I last checked) significantly cheaper than office 365, but everybody wants excel so ....

closeparen 7y ago

I'm not surprised. The coup at AWS was programmable infrastructure. It's building blocks that fit together in the way that software engineers know and love: APIs. Sure there's a sales bro for the pointy haired boss and a console for the IT technician, but the thing is the API. It's going to be used primarily at engineering-driven companies, where "holy shit this is cool" is actually a factor in the decision. Most of those will be startups that flare out, but some will grow up to be tech companies that run very large, very locked-in, very expensive workloads. But an IT manager's only real interest in AWS is trend-following. Microsoft thrives in a different world. IT managers are dealing with lots of different vendors (MS, VMWare, Dell, local HVAC and security contractors) to run their Windows Server workloads. It's pretty attractive to instead just pay Microsoft. But the nature of the workloads will not change, at least in the short term. It's still about technicians clicking in GUI consoles. I'd wager that usage of the Azure APIs is almost zero. Every business with a traditional IT department will end up with an Azure account, and the Fortune 500 is no exception. But the size of those workloads will scale with the number of enterprise apps they're running (each one its own VM). That won't necessarily grow with those businesses. It may even decline, as shrink-wrapped software for Windows Server is displaced by SaaS companies running on AWS.

heavenlyblue 7y ago
Forgive me for my ignorance, but doesn’t Azure provide the same APIs as AWS? PS: I have onoy used AWS
- closeparen 7y ago
  It provides roughly thee same APIs, but the cultural context it sits in is different. The APIs are there for parity with AWS, not as the key value proposition.
  - mac_was 7y ago
    Any examples to backup up your opinion?

kresten 7y ago

What’s the relationship between Goldman Sachs and Microsoft?

carlsborg 7y ago

But yet the story mentions that aws Q3 revenues were more than double Azure estimates. Does Microsoft count Office365 revenue as cloud/azure revenue?

ifthenelseend 7y ago
No. they are separate revenues in report.

therockspush 7y ago

The twist is a lot big companies(Global 2000) are the least cloud savvy, being dragged kicking and screaming out of their data centers. They don't even know what they don't know, and when Azure shows up offering AD which they already use to manage their juggernaut of a domain it feels like home. They haven't even considered lock in yet. The teams that end up managing Azure infrastructure come from a more IT/Networking background. Azure supported UDP load balancing before AWS, and has more intuitive and easier to build internal load balancers. AWS tends to appeal to more cloud native companies that just want to build and tend to be younger. Azure appeals to the familiarity and ease of transition for the 20 year IT squad that is trying to stay relevant.

a012 7y ago
Transition from premises to hybrid or cloud-only is difficult and costly for big com. Additionally when they're already attached to MS Exchange and AD, Azure is logical decision. UDP loadbalacing is like icing on the cake.

arsenico 7y ago

Pears to apples absolutely. It is an interesting observation, but for most of cases, which I am aware of, big companies are using Office365 and, probably, Dynamics, which automatically makes them the Azure customer and ticks the "Migrate to cloud" box at IT presentations to the boards. AWS, on the other hand, is being used primarily for either proprietary AWS technology, or just simple EC2s, which are very slow to be moved over to the clouds by the big companies.

mikebos 7y ago

Yeah not surprising, MS is pushing azure as hard as it can, to the point of given heavy office 365 discounts so on the short term it doesn't make business sense to move out of azure anymore.

carlsborg 7y ago
Although claiming companies should build their applications on azure infrastructure because they already use office 365 is an argument that will only be bought by non technical boards. They get the cloud they deserve!

simo7 7y ago

Yet I have the feeling GCP is the one which has been improving the most the quality of its offering. It's interesting to monitor what's happening with data-warehouses for instance. It almost feels AWS is having its "Kodak moment" with Redshift: a very remunerative but old technology in which they are deeply invested in. It prevents them to put more effort behind solutions that decouple compute from storage (see Athena) and as a result they are offering a subpar competitor to BigQuery.

PasserBy2025 7y ago
Committing to long-term support is part of quality. And this is simply not there with Google products.
- v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
  Not there with free consumer Google products. Their enterprise level GCP support is pretty much the same as the other providers.
- simo7 7y ago
  As in not phasing out products? That's more of a problem with Google than GCP itself. GCP has its problems (heard bad things about CloudSQL support for Postgres), but it does seem to be willing to innovate when it sees an opportunity for it. My point is about AWS being reluctant to embrace new technologies that could damage the ones it's deeply invested in. See Athena vs Redshift or Kubernetes vs ECS (the latter having much better support). That's what I meant by "Kodak moment".
  - sp332 7y ago
    It's more that a conversation among top leadership at Google and Alphabet was leaked, where they put GCP into an artificial do-or-die situation regarding growth and funding. https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/google-reportedly-set-ambitious-goal-and-possible-deadline-for-gcp https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/google-reportedly-set-ambitio...
audleman 7y ago

curiousdevops 7y ago

Forgive me to grab some attention here. I am AWS DevOps engineer in small startup, I am thinking to move to consulting area. Anyone can recommend what kind of service can I provide for enterprise companies switched to Azure as a consultant?

mcv 7y ago

The bank I'm working for recently decided to switch to Azure despite the vast majority of developers preferring AWS. From what I've heard, it's probably related to the company switching to Office 365. Sounds to me like Microsoft is leveraging its dominance in one market to also dominate another market.

warrenm 7y ago
One-throat-to-choke is a nice place to be, sometimes, for a business

ak39 7y ago

It's quite possible this data correlates with data about popularity of enterprise database technologies. Microsoft SQL Server/Active Directory "kill it" in ye olde enterprise settings - and for good reasons too. For example, their software has been affordable for smaller, evolving departments (I know they were cheapest about a decade ago among the proprietary DBMS stacks before they revised SQL Server licence fees post 2008R2 etc), but most importantly they have the most cohesive development, deployment and cloud integration tools for the typical enterprise. Visual Studio and SQL Server tooling have let veteran Microsoft users experience the same tools for Azure as though nothing has changed! This was a killer move from Satya Nadela's team. Balmer's "Developers, developers, developers ... " strategy is still paying dividends for this company.

varshithr 7y ago

Where does GCP stand in all this? Are they still an alternative or back-up cloud? I believe GCP is trying hard to match AWS and Azure in terms of capabilities but not sure how GCP handles non-technical aspects.

dcchambers 7y ago
It seems like people are really only using GCP for Kubernetes stuff and some TPU processing stuff.

code4tee 7y ago

These results are misleading for the same reasons why Microsoft’s market share claims are misleading. Microsoft counts things like Office 365 and Azure AD as “cloud.” If you look at people truly using their cloud products in terms of things that pair off against AWS offerings the picture looks vastly different. I’ve worked with many companies recently that are broadly “all in” on AWS but still use O365 and AD as core to their infrastructure. All these surveys and studies count such companies as Azure users but in practice they’re really not. Equally the companies that are still mostly not in the cloud but use O365 and maybe Azure AD for some 3rd party app auth are also counted as Microsoft Cloud users when they’re really not. As they say 82% of statistics are mostly made up.

w0m 7y ago
they're competing in different-but-overlapping markets. marketing spin can say whatever story you want on both sides as it's competitive.
Analemma_ 7y ago
> Microsoft counts things like Office 365 and Azure AD as “cloud.” Please stop repeating this. Microsoft started reporting Office 365 revenue separately from Azure revenue years ago.
- ifthenelseend 7y ago
  Just checked the report and this is true. Microsoft haters becomes really annoying with all their lies.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> Microsoft counts things like Office 365 and Azure AD as “cloud.” Even if that was true, AWS also counts their parallel but far less complete services.

okareaman 7y ago

I'm a retired programmer and now Uber driver in Silicon Valley so I often talk shop with my riders. I was giving a guy a ride to make a pitch for his product to a Japanese company. He related that his biggest challenge so far was when Walmart licensed his product and they insisted it absolutely could not be hosted on AWS so he had to transfer over to Azure. Obviously Amazon and Walmart are competitors and that might apply in many other situations.

stevewodil 7y ago
I feel like you should start a YouTube channel. In that area I'm sure you have a lot of interesting conversations with technical people, and entrepreneurs trying to make it
- hnrodey 7y ago
  At a minimum I would follow his Twitter account if he's sharing stories.
  - okareaman 7y ago
    Sometimes people are careless and I get inside information but I'm smart enough to know that and not act on it.
- okareaman 7y ago
  Some passengers use the ride as a confessional or just to vent. I feel it would be wrong to share too much about what they say. It seems like an unwritten rule. I don't have a front/rear view dash cam like a lot of drivers advise because I appreciate these conversations and don't want to inhibit them.
  - stevewodil 7y ago
    Of course you would get their permission to record them!

soverance 7y ago

Man the amount of opinions and misinformation in this thread is staggering.

shanemlk 7y ago

I've only used Azure so far. I can see why a big company would choose Azure. Although as we move further into the tech era, we're going to see a decline in the size of companies. Internet services will continue to make it easier for small companies to offload pieces of work to other small companies. They'll get good quality results for reasonable costs. Then soon, these small companies are producing big company results, shaving off big company profits. Welcome in the hunter gather era of computation. Bottom line, if Azure stays around, it's just going to become what AWS already is.

runeks 7y ago

I think Azure is so relatively popular because Microsoft is the only consultant company who owns a cloud. Generally speaking, for any piece of software -- cloud infrastructure, (managed) database, CRM system, operating system, office suite -- Microsoft has it and has consultants you can hire to help implement it in your company. That's why Microsoft is doing well, as car as I can tell.

fred_is_fred 7y ago
Two other reasons: 1) They have the consultants and more than likely an existing business relationship for Windows, Exchange, etc. 2) They are not likely to compete with you - Amazon is trying to compete with everyone and nobody wants to fund their own demise.