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Comment by Pandabob | Hacker News Reader

Meh. I'd wish Microsoft and Google would start separating their actual cloud platform (Azure, GCP) revenues from their "cloud" SaaS revenue (Office 365, G Suite). It'd make comparisons to AWS a lot more meaningful.

Edit: Apparently Microsoft is already doing this.

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This has become a meme and urban legend at this point, but Office 365 revenue isn't included in Azure's revenue. G Suite is included in GCP revenue though.

TechCrunch says differently:

>Turning to Microsoft, it reported a combined cloud revenue, which includes SaaS (Office 365, Dynamics, etc.) and cloud computing (Azure), of $12.5 billion for the quarter.

Could you provide a source? I can certainly believe TC is wrong, but contradictory information isn't great.

From https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q2...

"Revenue in Productivity and Business Processes was $11.8 billion and increased 17% (up 19% in constant currency), with the following business highlights:

· Office Commercial products and cloud services revenue increased 16% (up 18% in constant currency) driven by Office 365 Commercial revenue growth of 27% (up 30% in constant currency)

· Office Consumer products and cloud services revenue increased 19% (up 20% in constant currency) with continued growth in Office 365 Consumer subscribers to 37.2 million

· LinkedIn revenue increased 24% (up 26% in constant currency)

· Dynamics products and cloud services revenue increased 12% (up 15% in constant currency) driven by Dynamics 365 revenue growth of 42% (up 45% in constant currency)

Revenue in Intelligent Cloud was $11.9 billion and increased 27% (up 28% in constant currency), with the following business highlights:

· Server products and cloud services revenue increased 30% (up 32% in constant currency) driven by Azure revenue growth of 62% (up 64% in constant currency)"

So Office 365 falls under category "Productivity and Business Processes", while Azure as well as 'server products' and 'enterprise services' fall under "Intelligent Cloud".

Their third category is "Personal Computing" which was $13.2 billion and includes Windows, Surface, Search / advertising (I guess Bing), Xbox.

Thanks! Seems like TC needs to get up to date :)

Edit: Does this include SPLA licensing? Trying to figure out what all is in there besides Azure.

Azure cannot be at 12B per quarter, it'd be larger than AWS. I still don't understand the numbers. :)

It's not, if you scroll up there's a fellow who determined it's closer to 2.5b a quarter for Azure.

"Azure" the broad marketing catch-all is 12B per quarter.

Azure the PaaS and associated cloud offerings are much less.

The root of the problem is that MS decided to expand what "Azure" is for marketing and financial reporting purposes beyond its PaaS origins.

It looks like this has changed [0]. Microsoft now places Office365 under “ Productivity and Business Processes”, which earned 11.8b in FY20 Q2.

Azure is under “Intelligent Cloud”, which earned $11.9b this last quarter.

0: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q2...

Thanks for bringing this up.

Based on that last sentence, Azure has a 12*4=48B$ annual run rate.

AWS has $40B annual run rate (https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-brings-in-nearly-10b-in-sa...)

Something is not quite adding up.

See below thread, but Azure + Enterprise services + server products are reported as "Intelligent cloud". It's intelligent cloud that has the $48bn run rate. So it's not a like-for-like comparison with AWS even though it doesn't include Office365.

Follow up question: It would be interesting to see the market share and revenues excluding the use from the own company or different orgs. E.g.: AWS without the Amazon Website use, Azure without the Office use, etc.

Is there any public information about it available?

On the flip side, if Google started 'buying' capacity from GCP for their search, ad, and other infrastructure, they would be the largest cloud vendor tomorrow by most measurements.

Why should Google and Microsoft separate those just because AWS doesn't make much in their "cloud" SaaS revenue, despite the fact that AWS doesn't separate it either?

Because one is about infrastructure and the other is about Software? Just because it’s in the cloud doesn’t mean they are the same.

Where do you draw the line? If I use the BigQuery UI to analyze data, is that "infra" or "software"? I use Cloud AI Notebooks to spin up a private Jupyter notebook in the Cloud, is that "infra" or "software"?

Yeah I find it interesting that all of the cloud providers do this when in reality it benefits microsoft the most, since they make the most money from their office suite

Office 365 is not counted in cloud revenue.

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-q1-2020-earnings-reven...

Lol I work at ms and got this wrong, oops! I think this is a recent occurrence though right?

What are you trying to decide based on their cloud platform revenue? I'm genuinely curious as to why it matters if they are huge or actually the largest on the planet.

A fair market comparison and based on that, where to invest.

Shouldn't it be more important how it can grow, and current costumer satisfaction so they don't switch? Current market only accounts the "now", you need to access possibilities and risk to understand if a stock price is cheap or expensive.

Maybe that's precisely why they are _not_ doing it. AWS is likely winning compared to them both, and having easily accessible, official market share figures could deter customers who want to avoid the "second best".

It’s a little unrelated but Azure and Office 365 are becoming the same thing in large enterprise, utilising the same Azure AD, letting you run the same powershell/python managed services on your office 365 platform from your Azure platform. Utilising things like OIOSAML for multi-organisational setups for IDM with a mix of local, azure AD and office 365 account management.

I personally prefer things like digital ocean or even heroku becaus they are so much easier to use and manage, but it’s really hard to build a business case on non-azure when you have 365, and there is no alternative to 365 if you’re in a GDPR sector.

We have plenty of procurement projects that are hosted in AWS by private suppliers, so it’s not like we’re somehow against other cloud vendors, it just doesn’t make sense to not chose Azure when you have 365, because that means you’re already partly there and already have the Microsoft certified and trained it staff.

And even more specifically, that Azure has been approved as a third party cloud vendor by your internal security, procurement, legal, and audit teams - no mean feat at lots of organizations.

What's special about Office 365 wrt GDPR?

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