Microsoft Azure's "sweet spot": Selling to software vendors
Microsoft Azure has found a "sweet spot" in the competitive cloud market with software vendors, Microsoft's Scott Guthrie said at the Structure conference on cloud computing in San Francisco on Tuesday.
"In terms of a sweet spot, we've focused a lot on... how do we be the business cloud for both businesses and also in particular software vendors," he said, pointing to Azure customers like GE's Predix and DocuSign.
Microsoft's reputation as a trusted provider of hybrid solutions "resonates" with those vendors trying to attract their own enterprise customers, said Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise Group. It's resonated across a wide swath of industries but has really gained steam in just the past year within financial services.
Currently, 75 percent of the world's largest banks are Azure customers, but Guthrie said, "In regulated industries, nobody wants to be first, but nobody wants to be last... As soon as someone said we're doing it, the phone started ringing."
Meanwhile, the percentage of Azure's non-Windows and non-Microsoft workloads continues to increase, Guthrie said. "We don't want to be the cloud for Microsoft workloads... we want to be the cloud for every workload whether it's container services on Linux" or around Hadoop or analytics, he said.