When Satya Nadella took over as the CEO of Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), he had defined his focus on emerging technologies, especially the Cloud. His focus on the segment has stood Microsoft in good stead. The company continues to outpace market expectations on all fronts. And, there is no holding back. Microsoft keeps adding companies to bolster its cloud offering and is slowly, but steadily, gaining market share.

Microsoft’s Financials

Microsoft’s Q2 revenues grew 12% over the year to $28.9 billion, ahead of the market’s forecast of $28.4 billion. Adjusted EPS of $0.96 was also ahead of the Street’s expectations of $0.87 for the quarter.

By segment, revenues in the productivity and business processes grew 25% to $9 billion. The intelligent cloud segment grew 15% to $7.8 billion, compared with the market’s estimates of $7.51 billion. Revenues from the personal computing unit, which includes gaming and traditional PC software climbed 2% to $12.2 billion.

Within the individual lines of business, Azure continued to deliver a robust performance. The cloud solution saw a 98% growth in revenue in the quarter. This is the 10th consecutive quarter of more than 90% revenue growth for Azure. Amazon’s AWS continues to remain the leader in the cloud market. According to steadily, gaining market share.

Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 online business suite also reported an impressive 67% growth in revenue with Office365 online personal productivity suite subscriber count growing to 29.2 million from 28 million a quarter ago. Sales of Windows operating system to computer OEMs increased 4% and the gaming revenue improved 8% due to the launch of the Xbox One X.

This was also the anniversary quarter for LinkedIn. Microsoft had completed the acquisition of LinkedIn a year ago for $26 billion. During the quarter, LinkedIn generated its highest ever revenues at $1.3 billion driven by growth in sponsored content, marketing solutions, and job postings revenues. Microsoft had completed the acquisition of LinkedIn a year ago for $26 billion. That is exactly what Microsoft has been doing. Last year, it integrated Dynamics 365 with LinkedIn to help salespeople deliver better outcomes using insights from LinkedIn Sales Navigator and LinkedIn’s professional network. The solution helps salespeople view LinkedIn information about leads, contacts, accounts, and opportunities directly in the Dynamics CRM.

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