I don't think Azure needs a big client like this. I'm pretty sure Azure is just printing money for Microsoft now as it is. IIUC, newer AD deployments with Mic

I don't think Azure needs a big client like this. I'm pretty sure Azure is just printing money for Microsoft now as it is. IIUC, newer AD deployments with Microsoft VM infrastructure automatically hybridize between local systems and Azure cloud, so there's basically a 1-click solution to deploying at Azure with a VPN instead of to local hardware you need to maintain and expand as needed, if there's even any local hardware at all and it's not AD deployed entirely in the cloud. I would say it's like if Amazon owned VMware, but that doesn't even quite encompass it, because many companies already have and need Active Directory environments so are already bought into the Microsoft ecosystem, and I'm not sure there's a combination of companies that actually compares to that. The closest might be Red Hat (maybe + VMware, but RH has virt offerings) + AWS, but that doesn't quite match either. Our company makes extensive use of CentOS but we also have a lot of Microsoft AD infrastructure we pay for.