My Learnings from Microsoft's 4th Quarter Results.

Last week, Microsoft reported its 4th quarter results – by most accounts it was a strong quarter, finishing off a strong fiscal year. Below are a few insights I picked up listening to the earnings call – and some thoughts on a few revenue growths triggers from last fiscal.

“Every Company is a Technology Company” – As Organizations across different industry segments are increasingly looking to digitally transform –they’ll increasingly leverage cloud solutions and bet on a handful of key platforms.

Microsoft’s modern workplace revenue has grown as more customers are betting on our Modern Workplace platform – notably our advanced workloads. Security & Productivity features help unlock innovative digital transformation scenarios.

Longer Term commitments to Azure. We’ve all read about how companies are increasingly leveraging Hybrid Cloud scenarios – combining Public & Private cloud scenarios. It’s interesting to note that as organizations large & small, bet on Azure for Public Cloud scenarios – they’re increasingly identifying benefits of Azure + Modern Workplace (M365) solutions.

Gaming – A growing number of endpoints are becoming Great Vehicles to deliver High End gaming experiences. Project X Cloud is one of the key services which will benefit from broader cloud infrastructure investments.

Multi-Cloud / Hybrid Cloud: As companies continue to invest in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud scenarios the total addressable market will grow exponentially, especially for Tier 1 workloads. Companies with strong public cloud infrastructure will be well positioned to provide meaningful & sustainable value to customers.

M365, Windows & Teams – For the first time, we have up to 5 generations of employees in the workplace, at the same time. Every organization strives to improve collaboration, productivity of an increasingly diverse workforce.

Windows remains an important OS platform for organizations - with over 800M deployments to date. The security & management capabilities of Windows 10 are a key value proposition of the M365 offering. Teams is having a compelling platform effect @ Microsoft – as communications & collaboration platform and a line of Business tool for meetings and Business Processes. Resulting in growing productivity gains for various work groups, notably knowledge workers and first line workers.

The full 4th quarter earnings webcast is available - here.