Why Microsoft Azure is growing faster than AWS
RightScale has published latest State of the Cloud report, which shows Azure is growing fastest among public cloud providers while the growth of AWS is flat. With over 5 years of experience in helping companies migrate to cloud, I want to highlight a few points that I believe are driving this growth:
- Microsoft knows the enterprise game. Well, you may say that IBM and Oracle do too. In the cloud race, Microsoft was initially late to the party but had their wake-up alarm soon. They lost the smartphone race with Apple and Google but moved fast within the cloud space. Microsoft quickly got to work and utilized their enterprise relationships. Contrary, Amazon had to start from scratch building their enterprise customer base.
- Microsoft has a robust and large partner ecosystem that is helping to push Azure growth. Let me explain why it matters. Start-up companies with DIY style founders, who are coding in their basement are not as much concerned about enterprise security or disruption to business users as a banking or manufacturing company. But when enterprise companies are looking to move their ERP or production systems to cloud, they cannot afford any downtime or lapse in security. That's why having trusted partners that act as your solution advisers is critical. AWS or Google both lack the strong partner base within the enterprise space.
- Hybrid cloud: Microsoft knew that enterprises might not want to move their production systems or all of their applications to public cloud. Their trump card is hybrid cloud backed by Azure Active Directory.
- Office 365 is a major success for Microsoft (it was the fastest growing business ever for Microsoft), and Azure seems like a natural extension for companies who are already using Office 365 making it easier for an enterprise to make the transition to cloud.
- Azure has become a broad and comprehensive platform which provide basic services like Wordpress hosting to very advanced workloads like Machine Learning or Natural Language processing or Blockchain.
- Microsoft is more open now and has strong support for both Linux and open source software. In fact, I have heard that 50% Azure workloads run some type of Open Source Software and 1/3rd of overall VMs run Linux OS.
Disclaimer: I am the founder and CEO of Motifworks, a Microsoft Gold Cloud Partner, that helps organizations to move their infrastructure and applications to Microsoft Azure. We focus exclusively on Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
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7 å¹´Microsoft is also the first to offer Blockchain as a Service with their Azure Ethereum Blockchain.
EMEA Executive consultant for High-tech companies
8 å¹´The right question is why MS fired a lot of people working in the Azure dpt ? Probably because real sales arenot so big than Amazon and Google.
Leading Digital @ Livpure Smart | Ex - 91mobiles | Techjockey | Homeshop18
8 å¹´Interesting Nitin, report from IDC estimates that public cloud spending will increase from $70 billion in 2015 to $140.1 billion in 2019 -- that's a lot of potential business up for grabs for service providers. As security continues to improve and enterprises increasingly move from on-premise data centers and infrastructure to the cloud, Amazon.com and Microsoft are positioned to soak up the largest shares of the unfolding market.
Co-Founder & CEO @ StoreHippo & Mystore?
8 å¹´If you look at the percentage growth then google is growing the fastest at 50% from 2016 to 2017. I agree that enterprises might prefer azure given the points you mentioned in the article. But startups prefer google cloud as it is the most developer friendly among the three. If you think from a different angle, most enterprises are going to be disrupted by startups in next few years so I assume google is going to catch up fast.
Co-Founder & CEO @ StoreHippo & Mystore?
8 å¹´If you look at percentage growth from 2016 to 2017, google is growing is growing the fastest at 50%. In my opinion, enterprises are going to be disrupted in next