The cloud portfolio of Office 365, Azure and Dynamics CRM Online contributed to delivering a decent fiscal first quarter for Microsoft which is looking forward to its consumer products hitting the mark this Christmas.
The vendor unveiled a 7% increase in revenues year-on-year for the three months ended 30 September up to $17.37bn and a 6% in net income to $5.74bn with its key products lifting the performance of several key divisions in the company.
The launch of Office 2010 and the productivity server offerings - Lync, SharePoint and Exchange - contributed to an 8% increase in revenues in the Business Division and the server and tools operation also saw a 10% lift in revenues when compared to Q1 last year.
On the consumer side, where the vendor is expecting a busy next couple of months, it has the Xbox, Windows Phone and Kinect which should sell in the run up to Christmas in decent quantities.
Kevin Turner, COO at Microsoft, promoted the positive: "We had another strong quarter for Office, SharePoint, Exchange and Lync and saw growing demand for our public and private cloud services."
Moving to the cloud seems to be suiting MS well, and with such a definite and focused shift, I for one am glad it was a success.
Hopefully this will see further investment in their cloud offerings, SaaS and Dynamics.