Microsoft launched its cloud platform, Azure, in 2010. Since the launch, the service has posted triple-digit growth, and in the last fiscal year the platform reported a growth rate of 102%. Considering the latest quarterly results, in which the company claimed that its intelligent cloud revenue grew a 5.6% year over year, we estimate that the annual revenue run rate for Azure can be close to $2.5 billion.  Azure, currently, is the only major cloud platform that is consistently ranked as a leader for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS).   While Microsoft continues to use the same platform that is used in Azure for some of its offerings (such as X-box live, Bing, Office 365, SQL etc.), it is extensively marketing its cloud offering to enterprises to roll out their services and applications on its platform. This is a two part article. In the first part, we will explore the cloud computing industry. In the second part we explore why clients are likely to flock to Azure as their go-to platform, suggesting there is a revenue opportunity for Microsoft.

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