This massive growth allowed the company to pull in $2.7 billion in revenue from Azure during the year. Results like this justify Nadella’s cloud first, mobile first strategy, but also highlight how much work Microsoft has to do.
Estimate Accuracy
Of course, it is an analysts job to know the market. That said, we have seen plenty not even be in the ball park before. Microsoft does not publicly report its Azure revenue (equally Google), so it is hard to know how accurate the estimates are. Microsoft does, however, publicly record its growth in non-monetary terms. At the end of last month, the company revealed Q2 FY 2017 results. The data showed overall Microsoft increased revenue year-on-year by 1% to $24.1 billion, with $5.2 billion profit. Cloud was a major contributor, with Azure revenue up 93%. Overall revenue for Microsoft’s whole cloud operations stood at $6.9 billion. In July last year, Microsoft announced its Q4 2016 results, ending its fiscal financial year. In those results, the company showed Azure had grew 103%, while overall cloud grew 7% to $6.7 billion. With overall intelligent cloud revenue growth and Azure percentage growth, the analyst numbers are surely pretty accurate.
