Microsoft On Track To Nearly Double Cloud Data Center Spend To $15 Billion

Microsoft is set to spend $15 billion on cloud computing data centers this year, up from $8 billion last year, building new facilities on average at a rate of one per week.

That was just a few of the mind boggling statistics that Microsoft East Region Vice President Karen Del Vescovo shared Tuesday with 150 IT leaders at cloud computing superstar solution provider GreenPages' 20th annual Cloudscape Summit at the Sheraton Harborside in Portsmouth, N.H.

Microsoft CFO Amy Hood will effectively "write a $15 billion check" for the cloud data centers that Microsoft will build this year, said Del Vescovo. "Not many CFOs get to do that," she said. "That is pretty impressive. She is well aligned with (Microsoft CEO) Satya (Nadella) on how we are going to continue to build this vision out."

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Microsoft now has more global data regions than any other provider with 34 data centers around the globe, more than double Amazon Web Services and Google combined, said Del Vescovo. "We are continuing to build out data centers, maintaining this hyper-scale capacity as we move forward," she said.

There are now 1.6 million SQL databases running on Azure; 2 trillion messages per month processed by Azure Internet of Things platform; 777 trillion storage transactions per day, with over 500 million users now in Azure active directory, said Del Vescovo.

Microsoft is adding on average over 120,000 Azure subscribers per month, up from just 60,000 per month the previous year, said Del Vescovo, with 40 percent of Microsoft's sales now coming from startups and ISVs, said Del Vescovo. "You should feel some sense of anxiety if you are not already getting there because everybody else is rushing to really disrupt your industry," she told IT leaders.

Over 85 percent of the Fortune 500 use Microsoft cloud products with more than 60 percent of them using more than three cloud products from the company, said Del Vescovo.

Microsoft is now a leader in 17 of the Gartner Data Center magic quadrants compared with six for Salesforce.com, three for Amazon Web Services, and one for Google, said Del Vescovo.

Del Vescovo praised Nadella, who took the helm at the company in February 2014, for driving a cultural change that has powered Microsoft's cloud computing growth.

Nadella has done a "masterful job" of driving a cultural transformation eliminating silos and business groups that created a lot of competition internally, said Del Vescovo. "He has really broken that down so that we can optimize all the resources across the organization and really bring solutions to life regardless of what business group they come from," she said.

GreenPages, for its part, is driving huge sales growth on Azure and Microsoft's cloud offerings, said GreenPages CEO Ron Dupler.

Dupler also praised Nadella for driving a cloud revolution at Microsoft. "Customers want to move to the cloud and Microsoft has changed its consumption model with Azure and Office 365 to be cloud-based," he said. "Both of those are driving Microsoft's momentum."

The percentage of workloads moving to public cloud is growing at an even faster pace than expected with 15 percent of workloads currently in public cloud expected to soar to 70 percent in a decade, said Dupler.

"There is a proliferation of next-generation cloud native applications, SaaS and customers taking their traditional application portfolios and moving them out to the cloud where applicable," said Dupler. "The reality is we are moving to a world that is hybrid cloud-based and increasingly public cloud-based. There are very few companies that aren't looking at public cloud technologies."