It was revealed in Microsoft’s Q3 2023 earnings call that Teams has accrued 300 million monthly active users.
The Microsoft Cloud produced a quarterly revenue of more than $28 billion, a 22 percent increase which the company views as evidence of its “continued leadership” across the tech sector.
Overall, results surpassed expectations, with Microsoft’s third-quarter revenue of $52.9 billion up 7 percent and 10 percent in constant currency. Amy Hood, CFO of Microsoft, attributed the success to sales teams and partners’ performance.
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, spoke about Microsoft Teams: “Teams usage is at an all-time high and surpassed 300 million monthly active users this quarter, and we once again took share across every category from collaboration to chat to meetings to calling as we add value for existing customers and win new ones like ABN AMRO, Jaguar Land Rover, Mattress Firm, Unisys and Vodafone.
“We announced a new version of Teams that delivers up to two times faster performance while using 50% less memory so customers can collaborate more efficiently and prepare for experiences like Copilot.”
The news of Teams hitting 300 million monthly active users comes only a month after Microsoft’s Q2 2023 earnings call, in which it was announced that Team monthly users totalled 280 million.
Nadella explains that Teams is also expanding its Technical Account Manager (TAM).
Nearly 60 percent of enterprise Teams customers purchase Teams Phone, Rooms, or Premium.
Teams Phone, the cloud calling market leader, provides customers with a three-year return on investment (ROI) of more than 140 percent, while Teams Rooms’ revenue has more than doubled year-over-year.
Teams Premium offers AI-powered features, such as intelligent recaps. It is one of the quickest-growing Modern Work products, with thousands of paid customers after only two months.
Microsoft Viva has also received a number of updates over the third quarter, including a new suite for employee experience.
Companies like Dell, SES, and Mastercard are using Viva for its ability to optimise goals, communications, learning, workplace analytics, and employee feedback.
Copilot for Viva was launched recently to improve employee engagement and performance with artificial intelligence and insights.
Leveraging large language models (LLMs) and data from Microsoft Graph, Copilot has also been added to Viva Sales to help sellers automatically generate content, such as customer mail.
Copilot for Viva Sales was preceded by the launch of Copilot in Microsoft 365 in March this year.
These innovations have driven growth, according to Nadella, across Microsoft 365.
Goldman Sachs, Ferrovial, Rogers, and Novo Nordisk chose to implement E5 (Microsoft 365 E5) to improve productivity, security, compliance, voice, and analytics.
Looking to the future, Hood said:
“We will continue to invest in our cloud infrastructure, particularly AI-related spend as we scale with the growing demand, driven by customer transformation, and we expect the resulting revenue to grow over time.
“As always, we remain committed to aligning cost and revenue growth to deliver disciplined profitability.
“Therefore, while the scaled CapEx investments will impact COGS growth, we expect FY ’24 operating expense growth to remain low.”
Hood also commented that Microsoft is committed to “leading the AI platform wave” and making the necessary investments to support it.
The company has already invested $10 billion into OpenAI, the parent company behind ChatGPT.
The AI arm of Microsoft has been increasingly finding connections and utility in its cloud and office productivity businesses, the growth of which has contributed towards Microsoft’s overall earnings results being boosted beyond expectations.
Regarding Q4 2023, Hood specifically predicted that “differentiated solutions”, such as its AI platform and Microsoft Cloud segment, will “drive another quarter of healthy revenue growth”.
