Posts from the ‘Microsoft’ Category

Feb 26

10 Charts That Will Change Your Perspective Of Microsoft Azure’s Growth

Microsoft Azure revenue grew 50% year-over-year in fiscal Q2, 2021, contributing to a 26% increase in Server products and cloud services revenue.
According to the latest earnings call, more than 1,000 Microsoft customers now use Azure Arc to simplify hybrid management and run Azure services across on-premises, multi-cloud and at the edge.
Commercial cloud gross margins increased to 71% in the latest quarter, up from 67% a year earlier.
There are now over 60 Azure regions globally, strengthening Microsoft’s competitive global position versus Amazon Web Services.
Microsoft reported $43.08 billion in the second fiscal quarter ended Dec. 31, up from $36.91 billion a year earlier,

These and many other insights are from Microsoft’s Fiscal Year 2021 Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call and related research. Microsoft’s early decision to double down on expanding their cloud platform by accelerating new product and services development and Azure region expansion is paying off. Azure’s revenue growth shows Microsoft is an innovation machine when it comes to the cloud.

In their latest fiscal quarter, Microsoft announced hundreds of new services and updates to Microsoft Azure alone. The most noteworthy are improvements to Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Azure Defender for SQL, Password spray detection in Azure AD Identity Protection, Azure Stack HCI, Azure Stack Edge, Azure Data Factory now being available in five new regions and many more. All Azure updates are available in an online index that provides options for finding those now available, in preview, or in development.

The following ten charts will change your perspective of Microsoft Azure’s growth:

Intelligent Cloud delivered the highest operating income of all segments in the 2^nd quarter at $6.4 billion or 36% of total consolidated operating income. This quarter, Microsoft’s success with indirect channel sales combined with more enterprise customers accelerating their cloud-first initiatives contributed to Intelligent Cloud leading all segments in operating income. The following is from the Q2, FY21 Earnings Call.

10 Charts That Will Change Your Perspective Of Microsoft Azure's Growth

Synergy Research Group’s latest cloud market analysis finds that Amazon and Microsoft are over 50% of the global cloud provider market, with Microsoft reaching 20% worldwide market share for the first time. Q4, 2020 enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services was just over $37 billion, $4 billion higher than the previous quarter and up 35% from the fourth quarter of 2019. Synergy Research notes that it has taken just nine quarters for the market to double in size.

63% of enterprises are currently running apps on Microsoft Azure, second only to AWS. Azure is narrowing the gap with AWS in both the percentage of enterprises using it and the number of virtual machines (VMs) enterprises are running on it. 6% of enterprises are spending at least $1.2 million annually on Microsoft Azure. Source: Statista and Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report, page 50.

2020 total cloud infrastructure services spending grew 33% to $142 billion from $107 billion in 2019, according to Canalys, with Microsoft’s indirect channel business fueling their 20% market share growth. Microsoft’s dominance of indirect selling channels is evident in the level of sales enablement, sales and technical support they provide resellers. Canalys’ Chief Analyst Alastair Edwards says that “organizations are turning to trusted business partners to advise, implement, support and manage their cloud journeys and articulate the real business value of cloud migration.”

19% of enterprises expect to invest significantly more on Microsoft Azure in 2021, leading all other cloud vendors this year. Microsoft Azure leads all vendors when compared to the percentage change in spending this year. It’s noteworthy that 61% of all enterprises interviewed expect to increase their investments in Microsoft Azure this year, second only to Microsoft SaaS software. Source: 2021 Flexera State of Tech Report, January 2021.

Microsoft Azure Stack is the second most-used private cloud platform by enterprises, with 35% of them currently running apps today. Azure Stack also leads all others in experimentation, with one in five enterprises, or 21%, currently in that phase of deployment. 67% of all enterprises interviewed in the 2020 Flexera State of the Cloud Report are either running Azure apps or are considering it.

Microsoft’s centerpiece for their intelligence investment is the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph, which processes over 630 billion authentications across our cloud services each month. Microsoft relies on the Security Graph to gain insights into normal behavior, including sign-ins and authentications and abnormal behavior, including attempted bypasses to two-factor authentication. Microsoft blocks more than 5 billion distinct malware threats per month, providing a great deal of useful data to analyze endpoints across customers’ networks. Source: Microsoft CISO Workshop 1 – Cybersecurity Briefing.

44.5% of enterprises say Microsoft Azure is their preferred provider for Cloud Business Intelligence (BI). Azure is considered 27% more critical to an enterprises’ Cloud BI requirements and preferences than Amazon Web Services. It’s noteworthy that 96.5% of all enterprises have a preference for Microsoft Azure BI versus its main competitors, including Google Cloud, IBM BlueMix, or Alibaba.

Microsoft Azure is the leading IoT platform worldwide by end-to-end capabilities with a total score of 276 according to Counterpoint Research. According to the methodology Counterpoint used for ranking IoT platforms, Microsoft Azure is considered a global leader in edge data processing, an increasingly important feature of IoT platforms worldwide. The ability to deliver IoT capabilities from the cloud to the edge helped Microsoft’s platform rank high in this category. Source; Statista and CounterPointResearch.com.

Microsoft Azure is the foundation for a Digital Supply Chain Platform that integrates supply chain partner, corporate, data & advanced analytics platforms and supply chain core transaction systems. The ongoing pandemic is putting continued pressure on supply chains. Most manufacturing executives say that employee safety, data security, remote worker access, supply chain visibility and insights visibility are high priorities. In response to these market needs, Microsoft Supply Chain (MSC) was created on the Azure platform. The diagram below explains how Azure is integral to the Digital Supply Chain platform.

Jan 14

Microsoft Leads The AI Patent Race Going Into 2019

There have been over 154,000 AI patents filed worldwide since 2010 with the majority being in health fields (29.5%), Industry-specific solutions (25.3%) and AI-based digital security (15.7%).
AI-based marketing patents are the fasting growing global category, reaching a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 29.3% between 2010 and 2018.
The second- and third-fastest growing global AI patent categories between 2010 and 2018 are AI-based digital security (23.4% CAGR) and AI-based mobility (23% CAGR).
79,936 patents were filed in the United States between 2010 and 2018, with the majority being in the health field (32.6%) followed by Industry-specific solutions (20.5%) and AI-based digital security (18%).
Machine learning dominates the AI patent landscape today, leading all categories of AI patents including deep learning and neural networks.

These and many other insights are from an excellent presentation recently given by Kai Gramke, Managing Director of EconSight titled Artificial Intelligence As A Key Technology and Driver of Technological Progress. EconSight clients include the Swiss Federal Council, German Federal Chancellery, leading European think tanks, research institutes and half of the German DAX-30 companies. The presentation and information shared in this post were generated using the PatentSight analytics platform. PatentSight is a LexisNexis company and you can learn more about them here. The following are the key takeaways from Kai’s recent research and presentation using PatentSight:

EconSight finds that Microsoft leads the AI patent race going into 2019 with 697 world class patents that the firm classifies as having a significant competitive impact as of November 2018. Out of the top 30 companies and research institutions as defined by EconSight in their recent analysis, Microsoft has created 20% of all patents in the global group of patent-producing companies and institutions. The following graphic provides a comparison of the top 3o in the group. Please click on the graphic to expand it for easier reading.

Machine learning dominates the AI patent landscape today, leading all categories of AI patents including deep learning and neural networks. Machine learning is based on the foundational concepts of Bayesian analysis, data mining, and predictive analytics. Machine learning algorithms and the applications they rely on are designed to find patterns in large-scale data sets, while also being able to solve complex, constraint-based problems by learning from the data. Enterprise software companies including Microsoft, SAP, and others are actively developing AI technologies that integrate into their existing platforms, streamlining adoption across their many customers. Please click on the graphic to expand for easier reading.

There have been 225,833 AI-based patents filed globally since 2000, with 30.7% being Industry specific (Industry 4.0 on the graphic below) followed by health-related patents (28.1%) 13.8% of all AI-based patents are for digital security and 11.9% for energy. It’s interesting to note that the fastest growing patents between 2000 and 2018 are for applying AI to marketing (22% CAGR) and AI-based digital security (18.8% CAGR). Please click on the graphic to expand for easier reading.