Windows Azure is known as a reliable professional cloud service and in the past 12 months, its revenues have touched the magical one billion dollar mark, gaining its entry into the prestigious One Billion Dollar Club.
The Azure platform includes SQL Server, SharePoint, Visual Studio Dynamics, Exchange, System Center and the complete portfolio for enterprise-level operations, with more to come in this year such as control of advertising from a remote location. Over the past six months, there has been an increase in subscribers by 48%.
The Microsoft Server and Tools Business, a part of the Azure project, has shown a healthy growth of 10%. The growth in both segments has prompted Microsoft to refocus on Azure besides pushing its AWS infrastructure as a service (IaaS) service launched only a few weeks ago.
The success has prompted Microsoft to vigorously promote Azure as a worthy competitor in the market, offering extensions to the IaaS structure, improvements in VPN components and new services based on virtual machine hosting. Microsoft has also introduced Windows Azure HDInsight serviced, a cloud-based Hadoop service, showing its support for open source. Azure is going strong with market pundits predicting a growth of 35% and doubling of income year on year.
