Only service I have really seen being used is O365 emails. Rest of the Azure is not really being used by most of our customer. They are still dipping their toes in water so yeah it look like smoke and mirrors. At least in my anecdotal experience.
Edit: I don't have an issue with down votes but seems like some people are angry. I just shared my experience.Can Microsoft show what is the revenue growth in absolute terms.They are including Azure credits into the Enterprise License Agreement and calling it cloud revenue. Availability of free credits does not translate into adoption necessarily. Enterprise customers are still evaluating the how costs will look like over a period of time.
IMO, Enterprise adoption of Azure is growing specially enterprises that rely on Microsoft stack exclusively.
In last quarter, I personally suggested to few friends at Microsoft stack dependent companies to migrate to Azure instead of mucking around with colo hardware, VMware, VM management, licensing etc. for external facing services. It is a change for me. Previously I used to suggest moving to Linux/open source stack to migrate to VPS providers or AWS.
That may be true, but for large companies they changed the business model where large account resellers would bid under cost to sell EAs, etc.
They effectively raised the cost significantly for perpetual licensing/SA to push you into services agreements. Simultaneously, you get favorable terms (ie. anything other than MSRP) only if you commit long-term. Upon renewal they try to make you give up your right to transition back to perpetual licensing for Office.
So my bet is this is bullshit, shifting office dollars to O365, which include plans where you're just renting Excel.
> IMO, Enterprise adoption of Azure is growing specially enterprises that rely on Microsoft stack exclusively.
Sure it is, I have no doubts about it's growing use. But that use is still in nascent stage so when Microsoft is reporting a sudden increase in cloud revenue is actually nothing but smart manipulation of ELA terms.
In reality Enterprise Customer aren't cloud ready . Simply running on premises virtual machines into cloud does not result in any benefits. Enterprise customers are not yet there to realize the cloud benefits like on-demand compute, containerization, resource right sizing. Though Windows 2016 might tip that balance.
Virtualization is taking to the cloud in a big way this year and next. Most of my clients are pricing out between azure, aws, and local providers/partners for their cloud VM needs. Vmware just announced a deal with Amazon I believe and windows server 2016 comes with gobs of stuff that's pretty clearly meant for being hosted up on azure.
It's not there yet for many since the WAN component is still too weak for many companies to migrate but when the need to remake comes up I'm seeing it in the cloud more and more, or dummy drops to the cloud. (Usb backup on premise and deliver the drive to cloud provider.)
My experience with Azure thus far has been not so great. Everything mostly works but the portal is just so painfully slow and difficult to coax along. Kind of doubt they will see the sort of exciting growth that AWS has seen, so yeah looking at accounting details would be key here.
I don't want to have to look up the commands every time I want to run a thing I do once a month, quarter or year. I just want to click a button that doesn't take 20 fucking seconds to load and isn't buried amongst a ton of useless menu items.
The joke in our office is that the Azure team gave the portal interface to the interns to do. It's a UI that's poorly thought out, poorly programmed and massively unresponsive.
It's so obviously been conceived of by a programmer who is inappropriately obsessed with their "innovative" modular design.
But a CLI? Certain types of people with amazing memories like CLIs, but please don't inflict them on the rest of us. They're shit. AWS's portal is good enough, but Azure's is rubbish.
The joke in MS offices that use the portal UX is often that it was a UI designed by Designers, or at least by someone who only ever saw screenshots of the UX in a powerpoint.
It's not much comfort, but know at least that the internal engineers feel the pain as much as you do and would love to see improvement in that area, but right now there seems to be a surprising amount of likely political willpower pushing its use against informed resistance. I make this post largely to encourage you to keep speaking up about the pain of the UI, since many of us certainly are internally.
The Node CLI is pretty good. Almost does everything the Powershell CLI does and works across platforms.
Their web portal is a lot better after they moved to the new "preview" one. The classic portal was pretty bad, but their transition from the classic to the new portal was even worse. There was a time period where certain operations were only available in the classic portal and other services were only available in the new portal. The transition took many, many months (maybe a year) and the new portal was initially very slow.
If you look at Google Cloud's and AWS admin portal, they are not really any better. Probably is a result of these cloud providers providing so many services, it's hard to organize it all. The others have faults also. For example, I hate how AWS does their form validation when creating new resources. You don't even know what's wrong until after clicking "submit" / "create", azure is more single page app like. With AWS, if the service you are creating requires a dependent resource like an s3 bucket for logging, you have to go create that dependency first. With Azure, you can choose to use an existing dependent resources or create new ones all in a single operation. There also seems to be less organization in AWS. With Azure, I like how Azure does their directory structure of sub panes. You can view all services at once with particular ordering like datacenter region or drill into a particular resource group or service type. With AWS, you always have to go to that particular service's "website" whether S3 or DynamoDB, etc.
I see enormous rates of adoption... Office 97 could easily be replaced by Staroffice if you wanted, but Office 365 is almost impossible to escape once you have put your data on it.
You guys know that institutional Wall Street investors aren't total idiots, right? They know this as well as you do. On the earnings call yesterday, more than one person specifically asked about the impact on revenue numbers of the migration from one-off to recurring payments, and seemed satisfied with the answers they got.
I'm not calling anyone an idiot, I'm just wondering whether their increase in share price is the result of developing new products or simply moving old products to a subscription model.
Creating useful /comparable to the end user editions of old (packaged software) products and offering them in a new way entirely is developing a new product.
People aren't simply signing up to pay by the month (though that can be desirable to some folks in itself). They're actually getting something different.
