Microsoft Joins Apple In Hitting $2T Market Cap As Azure Sales Fly

The milestone was made as Microsoft plans to unveil the “next generation” of its Windows operating system and as Azure cloud revenue continues to grow at a fast clip. In its most recent quarter, Microsoft said Azure sales were up 50 percent year-over-year thanks to pandemic-related tailwinds.

Microsoft has become a $2 trillion company, less than a year after archrival Apple reached the market capitalization milestone.

The Redmond, Wash.-based company hit the $2 trillion market cap as its stock price grew roughly 1.1 percent to $265.51 per share. This makes Microsoft the second U.S. company and the second technology company in the world to reach that milestone after Apple became the first last August.

[Related: Microsoft Teams Unleashes New Hybrid Work Features In ‘Pivotal Moment’]

The milestone was made as Microsoft plans to unveil the “next generation” of its Windows operating system and as Azure cloud revenue continues to grow at a fast clip. In its most recent quarter, Microsoft said Azure sales were up 50 percent year-over-year thanks to pandemic-related tailwinds.

“We are building Azure to address organizations‘ needs in a multi-cloud, multi-edge world,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a Tuesday call with analysts.

In CRN’s exclusive Cloud Barometer survey published earlier this month, solution providers awarded Microsoft Azure with the highest overall satisfaction rating — giving it first-place finishes in product capabilities, profitability and maturity of pricing over Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

“Their partner programs are much more mature. Microsoft has just been in the business of partners for much longer than Amazon or Google,” Reed Wiedower, global alliances leader and CTO for the Cognizant Microsoft Business Group, a Microsoft Gold partner and Azure Expert MSP, told CRN.