Microsoft Says It ‘Tries Harder’ Than AWS

A Microsoft spokesperson has said that the company will try harder to become the number one public cloud provider as competition between Amazon Web Services (AWS) and itself heats up.

Microsoft Azure’s executive vice president of cloud and enterprise, Scott Guthrie, told Fortune: “Obviously we aspire to be number one, but until then we’ll use the Avis model and try harder.”

Guthrie is referring to the long-time slogan of car hire company Avis: “We Try Harder”.

AzureCon

His comments come off the back of a bonanza week for Microsoft Azure, as the division held its online-only AzureCon conference to release a plethora of updates and additions to Azure.

The company updated a large number of features surroundings Azure, focusing efforts on showing support for containers and the Internet of Things (IoT), as well as releasing cloud security upgrades.

The updates comes as Microsoft revealed it will be changing the way the company reports its financial results, lumping Azure into a category called the ‘Intelligent Cloud’, Microsoft’s future vision of cloud computing.

Microsoft also this week opened three new data centres in India, becoming the first of the larger US public cloud providers to offer cloud computing regions in the country – beating both Amazon Web Services and Google.

Rivalry

Within the enterprise, both AWS and Azure are the two leading the pack. In third place, in terms of revenue and customers, comes Google Cloud.

Amazon Web Services generated $1.82 billion in revenue in the second quarter of 2015, aiming for a 2015 revenue of around $6 billion.

Azure, unlike AWS, provides software-as-a-service offerings. Microsoft wants to let potential customers know that if you want both the infrastructure and the software then come to it. For example, Microsoft includes its Office 365 SaaS platform in its Azure revenue counting – a revenue that is estimated by research firm Wikibon to be almost $10bn in 2015.

But measure Azure’s revenue in just Infrastructure-as-a-Service terms, and other research firms estimate much lower revenues. On the infrastructure side, Microsoft could be set to make just $700 million this year.

Next week will see Amazon Web Services’ annual re:Invent conference kick off in Las Vegas, where we will no doubt see a gushing of news announcements from the provider. TechWeekEurope will be there, stand by.

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