Microsoft's competitors may be taking a cue from its thriving cloud business, CNBC reports.
Earlier this month Microsoft reported $30.1 billion in revenue for the second quarter of 2018, up 17 percent year-over-year. The company attributed much of this growth to an 89 percent year-over-year increase in revenue from Azure, its cloud-computing service.
These numbers suggest that Microsoft is becoming a major competitor to Amazon, which currently sits as the top cloud company. Synergy Research, a market research firm, reported Microsoft's Azure held a 14 percent share in the cloud infrastructure market during the second quarter, compared to Amazon's 34 percent.
As Microsoft's cloud share continues to grow, Amazon and Google — another top cloud provider, with six percent of the cloud infrastructure market share, according to Synergy Research — have released products that address "hybrid cloud," a core service Microsoft embraced years ago, according to CNBC.
In 2015, Microsoft unveiled Azure Stack, a hybrid cloud-computing software that enables customers to manage both cloud services from Azure and software they run in their own on-premise data centers. Now, nearly three years later, Amazon and Google have been introducing new tools to address this market need, more fully supporting customers that keep some computing work on their own servers.
Amazon's cloud-computing platform released new capabilities for Snowball Edge, a data migration device meant to help organizations move data into the cloud. With the new capabilities, customers can run additional computing tasks on the device, even if the data sits in a location off Amazon's cloud.
Google, too, introduced a hybrid cloud software in late July, dubbed the Cloud Services Platform. One of the services, the Google Kubernetes Engine, allows customers to manage Docker containers on an organization's existing data center infrastructure.