Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: We ‘Outgrew The Market In Every Category’

Nadella On Azure Resiliency

Overall, we’re not immune to what’s happening in the macro broadly, right? … I’d start there because whether it’s on the demand side with consumers or SMBs. … But what’s happening in Azure, though, is in some sense businesses trying to deal with the overall macroeconomic situation and trying to make sure that they can do more with less.

So for example, moving to the cloud is the best way to shape your spend with demand uncertainty, right? In fact, if anything, one of the things that we’re seeing is an increased shift toward the cloud, and then of course, optimizing your bill.

We are incenting, even, our own field to ensure that the bills for our customers come down. That, in fact, even shows up in some of the volatility in our Azure numbers because that’s one of the big benefits of the public cloud.

And that’s why I think, coming out of this macroeconomic crisis, the public cloud will be even a bigger winner because it does act as that deflationary force.

So that’s sort of what we are seeing in the Azure numbers. We will be exposed to consumer-driven businesses and SMBs. But at some level, our strength as a company is much stronger in the core commercial. So I think that we will do fine there.

The other one is also people building new applications at a completely new frontier. I mean, there are two numbers that I talked about. One is the triple-digit growth in Cosmos DB and triple-digit growth in container app services.

You take those two things and you say, ‘What are people doing?’ People are writing applications at a completely different frontier of efficiency, which is a cloud-native, serverless, container-based type of applications. And so to me, that’s another way for you to make sure that your IT spend goes a long way in a time like this.