Microsoft Azure, the world’s biggest cloud? Someone’s fudging

August 5, 2014 Off By David
Object Storage

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Matt Asay.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) may be the cloud leader, but Microsoft Azure is gaining fast and should surpass AWS revenues by the end of 2014 — at least, according to Nomura analyst Rick Sherlund. Still, as well as Microsoft may be doing, Sherlund’s $5.7 billion revenue target for Azure doesn’t stand up to serious scrutiny.

Azure on fire

Let’s be clear: Microsoft Azure is doing well — really, really well. Though neither Microsoft nor Amazon break out their cloud services revenues, Microsoft noted in its last earnings call that cloud revenue grew 147 percent year-over-year. This led Nomura analyst Sherlund to predict Microsoft will hold the crown as top cloud by revenue by the end of 2014…

While Sherlund’s contention is almost certainly wrong (more on that below), Microsoft has concrete Azure numbers, shared at WPC 2014, that should buoy even the most ardent Azure admirers. As Neowin’s Brad Sims captures:

  • 57 percent of Fortune 500 companies now use Azure
  • More than 300,000 active websites
  • More than 30 trillion storage objects
  • 3 million requests per second
  • 13 billion authentications per week
  • More than 1 million SQL databases in Azure
  • 300 million Azure Active Directory users
  • 1.65 million developers registered with Visual Studio Online

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