
Microsoft Cloud Strength Highlights Second Quarter Results - theatraine
https://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earnings/PressReleaseAndWebcast/FY16/Q2/default.aspx
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simonebrunozzi
Most of Azure's revenue is inflated. It is actually fake revenue, subsidized
into ELA deals. Heavily.

If you talk to customers, all they're using is AWS, and some breadcrumbs of
Azure here and there.

I don't know how they're even allowed to present financials this way.

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edgyswingset
So I'm supposed to trust an anecdotal "everyone actually uses AWS" comment
over an official earnings report?

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bedhead
I dont know about ELA deals but Azure is something like 15-20% of the size of
AWS based on other various data points. My BS detector also went off about
their $9b run-rate comment.

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adventured
They didn't claim Azure was at $9 billion. They said "commercial cloud." They
use different terms for them, whether one thinks that is meant to be
intentionally confusing is another matter.

The only number they claimed on Azure, was 140% growth:

"Azure revenue grew 140% in constant currency with revenue from Azure premium
services growing nearly 3x year-over-year"

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mark_l_watson
I run most of my stuff on Azure. I am part of the Bizspark program which
includes a generous free Azure allowance. Yes, I am grateful for that.

That said, in the past I have also used AWS and Google cloud services a lot,
and I don't really have strong opinions about which features of these three
services that I like best.

One thing that I do have a strong opinion on is the extremely high value of
Office 365 for $99/year for the family plan. Everything works fine. We use
just a bit of OneDrive storage but having all of the apps run on all of our
devices is useful. On Linux, I just use the web versions.

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CryoLogic
Some how these numbers are higher than AWS's numbers in the same quarter.
Something weird is going on. Are they lumping other MS products which run in
the Azure cloud into this figure? Office 365, etc?

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AdamTReineke
The 10Q has more on this, search for the section titled "Note 18" on business
segments.
[http://apps.shareholder.com/sec/viewerContent.aspx?companyid...](http://apps.shareholder.com/sec/viewerContent.aspx?companyid=MSFT&docid=11131896)

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mrmondo
This has to be inflated, I've heard of people trying azure but not actually
using it. I've heard from two groups that tried it recently that there were
pretty dreadful problems with unexplained outages or unexplained poor IO
performance.

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adventured
Inflated? It has been quarter after quarter after quarter. This isn't a new
result.

It's very clearly not inflated. Azure is the #2 competitor to AWS at this
point. Their quarterly results have been telling the tale of this build-up for
the past two years.

AWS just grew by nearly 70%, and is quite a lot larger than Azure. It's not
surprising that Azure would continue to grow so fast.

There seems to be a lot of confusion here about the Microsoft report. Nowhere
in that report did they split out Azure sales, only "commercial cloud" ($9.4b
annual run-rate) and "intelligent cloud" ($6.3b sales). The sole thing they
were specific about regarding Azure, is 140% sales growth.

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arethuza
I think the point is that Microsoft's cloud services are rather more than
Azure (even though Office 365 and Dynamics CRM share bits of Azure
infrastructure such as AAD).

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twunde
Is anyone here actually using Azure? My teammates using it have encountered
all types of problems, with bad stability problems (worse than rackspace and
their bimonthly outages)

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Maarten88
I do, and think it's a good proposition for startups.

Office 365 makes it easy to setup the organisational IT (login based on your
own domain, email, storage, document collaboration, chat). Add Power BI if you
need fancy (realtime) analytics and charts.

Then you create a private git repository (using the same login) for your
startup product and configure continuous deployment using Visual Studio Online
and Azure. Most of the Visual Studio Services are node-based now, so it's
cross-platform and you can deploy to Linux too.

It's also easy to add other services if you want (Slack, Zoho, Google).

All this is managed with a single login, paid with only two bills (Office 365
and Azure are separate). The Azure bill can be lowered if you get into
BizSpark.

This all saves a lot of work, a single person can create and manage a very
advanced infrastructure without too much effort.

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redwood
I think the question meant... for running applications with real workloads.
IaaS

