Microsoft sales surge amid demand for Teams and Azure

Teams hits 115 million daily active users and Azure growth accelerates

       Microsoft saw sales surge in its Q1 as demand for Teams and Azure continued amid the pandemic.

Revenue for the period ending 30 September climbed 12 per cent year on year to $37.2bn. Operating income rocketed 25 per cent to $15.9bn. Microsoft highlighted its commercial cloud products - the likes of Azure and comme

rcial Office 365 - as driving the growth. “We’re off to a strong start in fiscal 2021, driven by the continued strength of our commercial cloud, which surpassed $15bn in revenue, up 31 per cent year-over-year,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said. “The next decade of economic performance for every business will be defined by the speed of their digital transformation. “We’re innovating across the full modern tech stack to help customers in every industry improve time to value, increase agility and reduce costs.”

!function(e,i,n,s){var t=“InfogramEmbeds”,d=e.getElementsByTagName(“script”)[0];if(window[t]&&window[t].initialized)window[t].process&&window[t].process();else if(!e.getElementById(n)){var o=e.createElement(“script”);o.async=1,o.id=n,o.src=“https://e.infogram.com/js/dist/embed-loader-min.js",d.parentNode.insertBefore(o,d)}}(document,0,"infogram-async"); Growth in Azure sales stood at 48 per cent, up from 47 per cent in the previous quarter (Q4). Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said that Azure growth could become a little less predictable over the coming quarters, as the vendor works through a number of big projects with large enterprises. “When I talk about them being more volatile it’s more that we don’t really focus on the exact moment in time that they get done,” she explained. “It’s really about making sure we make them successful far more than which quarter that they arrive in. So that does just result in a little bit more volatility in that bookings number.”

Nadella also highlighted Teams as being key to recent growth, and also driving adoption of the wider Microsoft 365 portfolio. He added that Teams now has 115 million daily active users. “The other aspect which I referenced in my remarks is, when you look at Microsoft 365 all-up, Teams is bolstering all-up growth because meetings are important but they’re transactional, he added. “Work happens before meetings, during meetings and after meetings. So, that ability to have the workflow completely stitched together is where Microsoft 365 really stands out. So, that reinforcing effect of Teams by itself and then Microsoft 365 in conjunction with Teams is where you’ll see a significant amount of usage growth, more so than individual tools of the past even.”

Microsoft saw sales growth across the vast majority of product lines, with Dynamics 365 (38 per cent) and Surface (37 per cent) in particular standing out. The five per cent decline in Windows OEM was “better than expected”, Microsoft said. The vendor’s share price fell as much as three per cent in after-hours trading, which CNBC reported as being due to weak guidance for Q2. Microsoft said it expects sales to be between $39.5bn and $40.4bn, which suggests growth of around eight per cent year on year.

Author: thomas.wright@incisivemedia.com(Tom Wright)

Date: 2020-10-28

URL: https://www.channelweb.co.uk/news/4022406/microsoft-sales-surge-amid-demand-teams-azure

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