10 ms·
Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon
- bradhe 14y agoThere is absolutely, positively, certifiably no way this is even close to true. Did the people are bloomberg even look at Microsoft's figures, or were they too busy counting the cash MS sent over?
- bpicolo 14y agoYou massively underestimate enterprise/corporate use.
- brazzy 14y agoAnd especially how a good sales team can inflate revenues in that market...
- mckilljoy 14y agoIt seems pretty reasonable to me. If Msft makes $1 billion on 20% of the market, and Amzn makes $3.8 billion (high-end analyst estimate) with 71% of the market, the math roughly matches.
- rgbrenner 14y agoI think those market share numbers are suspicious.. according to rackspace they had 1.3b in sales of private cloud and public cloud services in 2012: http://ir.rackspace.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=221673&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1784359&highlight= http://ir.rackspace.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=221673&p=irol-ne... So either the total is more than 100% market share for the 3, or those numbers or wrong. Edit: added "in 2012" for rackspace financials
- mckilljoy 14y agoI'd agree, most of these numbers are "fuzzy" and based on analyst estimates; I'd almost be more surprised if they DID perfectly add up to 100%. :-)
- ig1 14y agoThe percentages aren't market share rather percentages of companies using the product. That is a company which uses both Azure and AWS could contribute towards both percentages.
- unabridged 14y agoI think you underestimate the penalties for lying about something like this in a publicly traded company, false statements about sales is securities fraud.
- outside1234 14y agoYou do know that Microsoft is dominant in Enterprise and that that is where most IT dollars are spent. The more surprising thing to me is that Microsoft isn't burying Amazon. But give them 2 years.
- danielrhodes 14y agoIt's clearly a puff piece. Having said that, there are a lot of MS server customers and I can imagine Azure being a compelling option if you don't want to do a rewrite.
- jonknee 14y agoIt's true if you bend the rules a bit... Read the article and you'll notice this gem: > Microsoft’s $1 billion sales figure includes Azure, as well as software provided to partners to create related Windows cloud services, Anderson said in an interview That is a really vague statement that could mean all sorts of things (Office 365, Windows Server licensees, etc).
- mckilljoy 14y agoThat looks pretty significant. Amazon Web Services are somewhere between $2 and $3.8 billion (depending on which analyst you believe), so Microsoft is potentially within striking distance of taking the crown.
- niggler 14y agoHow are the free hours from BizSpark handled? (http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/offers/ms-azr-0012p http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/offers/ms-azr-0012p) Are those treated as sales?
- barista 14y agoEven if they did, they probably don't add to the 1B figure as they are free
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- josh2600 14y agoI don't want to describe this comment as ignorant but I almost feel that I have to... There are numerous accounting tricks employed by organizations big and small to book revenue on promotional services. One popular way of doing this is to charge the marketing departments budget for the promo hours but record the cost of the hours as revenue. The overall bottom line of $MSFT is uneffected but the product, in this case azure, benefits from increased visibility. I don't think Azure is doing anywhere near AWS in sales if you don't count promo deals.
- jaynate 14y agoCompletely agree with this. They are giving away massive amounts of platform time to seed usage. Better question is when Azure will break even (net, including R&D and internal marketing transfers to the Azure business).
- gravitronic 14y agoThis seems highly unlikely considering they don't remember to update the azure SSL certificate two years in a row. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/02/25/windows-azure-cloud-crashed-by-expired-ssl-certificate/ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/02/25/windo...
- marshray 14y agoIt's not "the azure SSL certificate", it's more that there are a great many of them being used internally between many systems.
- gravitronic 14y agoIt caused a global outage for SSL access to their cloud storage. Two years in a row. Close enough.
- sriramk 14y agoThey were two very distinct issues, both in retrospect, should have been preventable. One was a cert not getting renewed correctly (which is really more of an engg/ops process thing) and the other was a piece of code that did date checks incorrectly. [Disclaimer - early and long time Azure guy at MSFT]
- codegeek 14y agoDoesn't surprise me. Microsoft has a strong hold in the "enterprise" (read large corporations with bureaucratic but big pockets) sector.
- sendob 14y ago"“The biggest advantage I have with Microsoft is I don’t have to go to any other vendor for any solution -- I can go to one partner for all of my operating systems, all of my development environment and all of my infrastructure tools,” he said. “Why would I waste time looking at another third-party." ^Interesting viewpoint.
- mladenkovacevic 14y agoMicrosoft's wet dream customer.
- mrtrombone 14y agoYes but an amazingly common one. If I look at the NZ city I live in (pop ~80k) both Tertiary institutes, City Council, Regional Council, primary Health organization etc are all very much happy Microsoft shops.
- jf22 14y agoI'm an MS dev with a little Django, Rails and PHP experience and I'm always sort of overwhelmed with the choices I have non-ms environments. Recently I wanted to get a simple laptop for Python development and I don't know how to begin selecting the right tools for the job. I see myself having to make all sorts of evaluations I'm just too inexperienced to make. Which OS? Whats PyPy good for? Is it supported on Ubuntu? Oh I can use this command to install but I don't see an apt get example? Does that mean it won't work? When I read about and fire up EC2 instances I feel the same way. How do I configure them? Which one is best, etc. With Visual Studio and the Azure tooling built in a lot of decisions are just invisible to me and I sort of like it that way. Of course I understand the benefits of open source and having a variety of options is important but I'm ok with giving up a little control and power to just get things done. I think its the same reason we use Stripe instead of getting out own merchant account and all that rigmarole. Isn't Heroku similar as in Heroku makes some choices for you on how to do things?
- ianstallings 14y agoKnowing the price of Azure that should mean they have roughly pulls out calculator and hits some keys.. 12 customers.
- venomsnake 14y agoSometimes you only need to have 2 - if they are like Nestle or Exxon ...
- Aloisius 14y agoAren't Azure's prices exactly the same as Amazon's?
- gecko 14y agoMicrosoft's prices for Azure are actually very reasonable, and I generally find their tools easier to configure and use in real life. Microsoft makes some horrible products, but I actually really like Azure a lot.
- captainchaos 14y agohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDAyI0imqGE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDAyI0imqGE I checked this out as a pretty heavy AWS user, and I have to admit that GUI looks pretty nice.
- locusm 14y agoMake sure you benchmark the VM's if you intend to use them - performance was horrible during the preview. http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1206086-BY-1103157IV31 http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1206086-BY-1103157IV31
- biot 14y agoThank you for contributing such a thoughtful and valuable comment to this discussion. It really serves to improve the signal to noise ratio and raise the level of intelligent discourse here.
- curiousDog 14y agoCould definitely be true if revenue from internal customers (Office 365, Hotmail, Xbox etc) is included.
- sriramk 14y agoI don't think either Hotmail or Office 365 use Azure in non-trivial amounts, or atleast they didn't in my time there until 2011.
- tbatterii 14y agoanyone know what app engine sales are? I don't recall ever seeing it mentioned in investor relations stuff makes me wonder why or if/when they will kill it.
- conjugate 14y agoMicrosoft Azure will not challenge Amazon, but will become huge/larger simply because almost all enterprise companies will only consider Microsoft and IBM products.
- conjugate 14y agoMicrosoft Azure will not challenge Amazon, but will become huge/larger simply because almost all enterprise companies will only consider Microsoft and IBM products.
- barredo 14y agoAre Apple iCloud services still hosted with Azure tech? http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/09/04/0051209/apples-icloud-runs-on-microsoft-azure http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/09/04/0051209/apples-iclo... Because that alone could be a large portion of that $1B
- ultimoo 14y agoYes, as far as I know Apple hosts their iCloud jointly on AWS and Azure. Which is a great strategy for disaster recovery or failover I think, considering both the cloud services are the largest and are owned by financially stable companies that have been around for a while.
- cadetzero 14y ago>"They haven’t excited the front-line developers -- the ones who made Amazon who they are," he said. "Those will be hard to influence." That may be true, but at the end of the day, startups aren't generating multi-millions/billions to spend on large server deployments.
- tytso 14y agoComparing against Amazon's total cloud sales may be comparing apples and orange. To quote from the article: "Microsoft’s $1 billion sales figure includes Azure, as well as software provided to partners to create related Windows cloud services, Anderson said in an interview." What software is included "to create related Windows cloud services", and is that the only use for said softare? i.e., are they including things like MS Visual Studio? And how much of MSDN subscription fees included in the $1 billion dollar figure, I wonder?
- jaynate 14y agoI wonder if the $1B number doesn't also include internal marketing "funny money" microsoft is using to seed the business. There are companies who have been given large stipends of free services to wet their appetite for the platform.
- megaman821 14y agoMost likely the software sales are Windows Server licenses and the Azure tools needed to make a private cloud. A lot of companies have policies that prevent them from using public cloud servers.
- OGinparadise 14y agoThe numbers are fishy, but if they are growing by XX% (1) a year, expect MS to reach that pretty soon. Love it or hate it, getting all your tech needs from one company has its advantages (and disadvantages). 1. Azure subscriptions have risen 48 percent in the past six months, said Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s vice president for marketing for the server and tools division. That unit, which encompasses Azure, has posted nine straight quarters of sales growth of at least 10 percent, he said.
- skylan_q 14y agoIt's easy to rise 46% in terms of subscriptions when they offer tens of thousands of dollars worth of their service for free.
- 14y ago
- blantonl 14y agoWho here on HN is running any portion of their startup or established Internet business on Azure?
- eli 14y agoI'm hosting some (really) non-critical stuff on a Ubuntu image on it. It seems fine. The manager interface is actually pretty good IMHO, but Linode is really cheap and running Linux on Azure is (I think) still a "beta" feature. I get the hours free though BizSpark. I was thinking of setting it up as a slave/mirror of our main sites for use as a fallover backup. It's been pretty reliable but I haven't done any benchmarks or really tested it in any way. If I had need or inclination to use the Microsoft stack, though, it would definitely be a serious contender.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- joahua 14y agoSounds like it was just because it's free. (BizSpark)
- cinquemb 14y agoPlease everyone, not all at once.
- Red_Curry 14y agoI like how HN is so blatantly anti-Microsoft, but Reddit is overly Microsoft supportive. Which hipsters do I believe in?!
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoI don't think it matters. If Azure is challenging AWS, Azure is challenging AWS. Who the buyers are is irrelevant; HNer dollars don't double when you deposit them in your bank.
- iamleppert 14y agoLove this quote: “The biggest advantage I have with Microsoft is I don’t have to go to any other vendor for any solution -- I can go to one partner for all of my operating systems, all of my development environment and all of my infrastructure tools,” he said. “Why would I waste time looking at another third-party solution?” ... "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". "I'm a lazy C-level exec." "I love having all my eggs in one basket." "I just write a check, and all my problems are solved." "Money buys happiness."
- bostonpete 14y agoI see your points but I think your characterization of this attitude as lazy or stupid are overly hostile. I'm not going to defend the mindset but I can see some appeal in having one company to deal with. Anyone who's ever faced a problem where multiple vendors are blaming each other for your ongoing woes knows how frustrating that can be.
- iamleppert 14y agoAnd that's what a CIO/CTO's job is. Be technically competent to understand the technology he is using, or (at least) have someone on his team that is. It isn't rocket science to figure out where the problem is (be it CPU, network I/O, some software run wild), etc. If you're involved in IT, especially if you're developing software, you should be able to do some rudimentary analysis of the software you're actually buying.
- rubinelli 14y agoThat's a very simplistic view. As many AWS, GAE, and Heroku clients will tell you, when your app is up there in the cloud, there are times when all the instrumentation in the world won't help you fix a problem.
- MichaelGG 14y agoThe flip side is that you end up in a scenario where two or three vendors can blame each other for problems. With Azure, if SQL has a problem, Microsoft has to fix it, and can't blame any other vendors, driver, hardware, or network issues. Edit: Also, really? You don't think there's any benefit to integration? That's like Microsoft's whole deal - make their stuff work well with their other stuff. Sure, it creates lock-in, but it's also a feature users want. I want my various programs to easily work with each other in obvious ways, and not have to worry about compatibility issues.
- derengel 14y agoThey are fast too, they already have ubuntu 13.04
- staunch 14y agoConsidering the pricing on their server software, I imagine at $1 billion revenue they must have a solid 10 happy customers.
- philip1209 14y agoCan Microsoft's internal Azure expenses be accounted for in sales? Specifically, if Office365 used $100 million worth of Azure services in their budget, does that count toward overall Azure sales? Does part of the marketing budget go toward giving out free Azure trials? Then, the question I ask is what percentage of Azure sales come from 3rd parties.
- brudgers 14y agoThe next time you see an article mentioning Microsoft's Online Services Division, it's history of losses, and suggesting that Ballmer should be fired, just remember that Azure's revenue is not part of the Online Services Division (and neither is Office 365).
- quaffapint 14y agoI LOVE Visual Studio and working in C# / Asp.Net MVC. I do it full time at work, and now writing my SaaS in it which I plan to host on Azure (though, I wish they had an official MongoDB offering). I've always done PHP on my side stuff, partly because of the hosting issues, but now with PaaS' like Azure and Appharbor, people who enjoy the MS Stack at least have reasonable options. People bitch about MS, but without competition from Azure, Google, and others, Amazon wouldn't keep lowering their rates.
- junto 14y agoMongo in Azure VM: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/linux/common-tasks/mongodb-on-a-linux-vm/ http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/linux/common-tasks/...
- skylan_q 14y agoI've been using azure a bunch at work. I don't know where the sales numbers come from. I have reasons for being skeptical after being in on conversations with their sales reps. I hate how they hide important details about their systems. The shroud of mystery is really infuriating. Useful bits in terms of performance metrics just aren't there or just aren't visible. I've used Amazon's services and Rackspace's services as well. I've had mixed experiences with all of them. I honestly feel that I'd be getting work done much quicker if I was just handed a vmware portal and managed VMs in a datacenter to implement our systems. It's very nice when you're able to SSH into a system and run top or other tools to see what's going on. Running queries or checking out charts that show data at hourly intervals is next to useless. As an added bonus, I wouldn't have to stop queries and go up to the application layer and reconnect to another shard in order to continue my query. I honestly don't know what's so appealing about Azure. Maybe devs these days don't know how to ping a server or set up a database. If it weren't for getting tons of free cash to start, we'd be on about 1/10th the "budget" using other services. But it's hard to beat free. Would I ever pay for it? Yes. But only in the situation where I had a bunch of sub-par developers. Id also be looking for an out from the company while getting patted on the back for going with MS.