According to Microsoft’s 2019 annual report – this year was another record-breaking year for the software development giant. They earned more than $125 billion in revenue, $43 billion in operating income, and maintained more than $50 billion in operating cash flow while shareholders saw more than $30 billion in returns.
Its commercial cloud business is the largest in the world, and surpassed $38 billion in revenue in 2019. With such impressive figures, Microsoft’s latest numbers are bound to make a believer out of those who remain pessimistic about cloud migration and all its benefits.
“I am proud of how we are helping organizations of every size in every industry innovate and thrive using our platforms and tools”
“And I am proud of how we are empowering everyone — consumers, students, teachers, and the more than two billion first-line workers around the world — with experiences to help them always feel confident, capable, and in control,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s Chief Executive Officer wrote.
How’s this Compare to Last Year?
When compared to 2019, Microsoft’s revenue grew by $15.5 billion or 14 percent, mostly driven by growth across Intelligent Cloud offerings as well as server products along with cloud services. Productivity and Business Processes revenue increased, too, primarily driven by Office and LinkedIn.
What About Teams & Azure?
What about and Azure and Teams? How did they fare this fiscal year as cloud migration is expected to rise? For starters, Microsoft reported that ’95 percent of the Fortune 500 use Azure for their mission-critical workloads.’ The key here is the flexibility Microsoft’s hybrid cloud solution Azure extends.
Microsoft customers who want to keep tender data on their own servers while benefiting from public cloud infrastructure as well – they gain a competitive advantage in the form of efficiency and productivity with the use of Azure.
Teams also gained some new capabilities this past year. Microsoft also noted that it was incorporating more AI across its Microsoft 365 suite to enable ‘new automation, prediction, translation, and insights.’ The aim here is to empower a smarter workforce and to boost productivity for its more than 180 million commercial Office 365 users.
Compliance, Security, and The Competition
Microsoft’s growth shows no signs of slowing down, although its main UC-centric offerings face competition from the likes of Cisco Systems, Facebook, Slack, Zoom, and more.
To further differentiate its offerings related to unified communications, Microsoft reported they added to an already lengthy list of compliance certifications and security measures they’ve achieved to-date. In its recent annual report, the software developer boasted about the number of compliance certifications and data center it had, stating:
“We have more than any other cloud provider, and we were the first to open cloud data-centers in the Middle East and South Africa”
With breaches to systems like Zoom and Cisco Webex Teams, companies like Microsoft have reinforced their commitment to ensuring end-user data remain safe. There is no secret that hackers are getting more creative and finding new ways to break into the systems enterprises use the most and social engineering remains the primary method of entry for those individuals.
