Welcome to Cloud Wars Minute, your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insight and perspective on the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
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Today’s Cloud Wars Minute compares AWS and Microsoft in terms of modern clouds and what customers are demanding.
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00:04 — Two of the biggest growth companies in the cloud wars over the past 10-15 years are Microsoft and AWS. Today, Microsoft is arguably one of the largest, most influential, and fastest-growing cloud vendors in the world, clearly dethroning AWS as number one by any measure. I would like to emphasize why it is important to recognize that
01:10 — Today’s modern cloud is very different from its heyday, when AWS created and became the leader in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) category. Kudos to AWS for that, but the cloud is so much more than that now. And now the cloud is defined by the customer – by what they want, need and expect.
01:48 — Some might argue that Windows, Office, and Teams aren’t actually clouds. This may be true from the eyes of Silicon Valley, but not from the eyes of customers. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently made comments during Amazon’s last earnings call suggesting that Microsoft isn’t really a cloud provider because it’s not as infrastructure-intensive as his AWS.
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02:37 — He said that from one quarter to the next, AWS revenue increased by $1.1 billion, “more than any other cloud provider.” The problem is that in the same three months, Microsoft Cloud revenue increased by his $1.9 billion. In the fourth quarter, he had Microsoft Cloud revenue of $33.7 billion and AWS revenue of $24.2 billion. Therefore, in the most recent quarter, which is the same period for both companies, Microsoft Cloud revenue exceeded his AWS revenue by 39%.
04:25 –Microsoft is bigger. We have a wide product base. On the software side, we’re doing more to help our customers gain more differentiation and business value. It’s important to bring this up in light of Jassy’s assertion that somehow Microsoft doesn’t exist or is not a true cloud provider. That’s ridiculous.
