Windows Azure Joins Microsoft's Billion-Dollar Business


Windows Azure Joins Microsoft's Billion-Dollar Business

Bangalore: Tech giant, Microsoft has made good plans to turn Windows Azure cloud computing platform to a billion-dollar year businesses. Currently, Azure joins the company’s other products that bring out about revenue in a billion or more dollars a year, reports arstechnica.

Apart from the trio of Windows, Windows Server and Office, company’s products and services include SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Xbox, Visual Studio, Dynamics, System Server and online advertising. Office 365 is also on track to turn over more than a billion dollar this year, as per the current revenue levels.

Comparatively, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is estimated to have come up with $1.8 billion in 2012. Microsoft is in progress of expanding its range of services offered under Azure. Initially, it started off with a Platform-as-a-Service offering, providing the ability to set up applications onto Windows servers with maintenance of the operating system software handled automatically by Microsoft.

This has further been expanded with the company releasing Infrastructure-as-a-Service support, which allows the use of custom virtual machines running operating systems chosen by customers. This new feature is believed to make Azure competitive with AWS, which had IaaS as a core feature since its inception.

Yet, Microsoft still struggles to get its products recognized by cloud users. The billion dollar revenue consists of both direct Azure revenue, and revenue from services the company sells to third parties to run their own Azure-like systems.

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