Microsoft Azure's Evangelist: 120,000 New Subscribers Monthly

CHANNEL PARTNERS CONFERENCE & EXPO — A Microsoft Azure evangelist shared numbers of the public cloud’s growth at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo in Las Vegas.

Rokeya Jones, director of technical evangelism, East, for Microsoft, used her Tuesday afternoon keynote speech to give partners an in-depth look at one of the chief rivals of Amazon Web Services.

Jones says Azure is built around four main areas: applications, data intelligence, openness and flexibility, and trust. Azure offers platform as a service, infrastructure as a service, as well as an IoT business segment.

She touted the amount of actionable data that Azure collects. Azure provides demand forecasting, which Jones says lets partners predict the needs of their end users.

“Without the data, you can’t service the needs of the customer,” she said.{ad}

Jones shared statistics that point to a growing number of Azure users. There are on average 120,000 new Azure customer subscriptions per month. Approximately 715 million users are currently on the Azure Active Directory, and 85 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Cloud.

Azure is competing against AWS in a public cloud market that is expected to comprise 60 percent of computing by 2020.

“We take value and pride in servicing you every single day, and that’s our mission — to empower you to be the best service provider that you can be,” Jones said.