According to latest figures released by Microsoft, its other cloud services and Windows Azure products have surpassed more than $1 billion in annual sales recently. James Staten, an analyst at Forrestor Research was quoted as saying that of all the companies in the cloud market, more than 20 per cent now use Windows Azure as opposed to the market leader Amazon AWS, which is still far ahead at 71 per cent. The recent growth coupled with the newest announcements by Microsoft has however made a significant impact in its market share, if multiple sources are to be believed. Staten went on to say that private cloud is one of the features which Amazon still has not matured on, and this is one of the places where Microsoft could grow its expertise and capture the market.
Windows Azure is a major attraction to customers who already utilize the Microsoft tools and software for their infrastructure. Johnny McIntosh, director of Goodyear tires’ fleet headquarters in North America said, “We opted for Azure over Amazon because we already used Microsoft’s database and programming tools”. Further client testimonials include Raman Padmanabhan, the Chief Information Officer for Xerox’s business services unit who added, “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.”
Microsoft already has a huge array of other services apart from its Windows Operating System, which are easily integrated into its cloud infrastructure. This is despite the fact that it also started supporting Linux as a supported operating system a few months back.
Microsoft has been continually pushing newer features with much better competitive prices than before, while directly aiming at capturing some of the share from Amazon web services. It managed to gain more than 10,000 new customers ever since it announced the new Infrastructure services division.
