Last week at TechEd North America, I had the opportunity to meet with a staggering number of customers, partners and analysts from all over the world.  There is nothing as energizing as hearing directly from customers like Milliman, Trek and Mando Group who are using Windows Azure to forge new ground. As I mentioned during an event, I’ve had the privilege of working on a number of high-growth businesses at Microsoft and in the Valley during explosive growth of the ‘90s.  That said, I haven’t seen anything that compares the growth we are seeing in Cloud Computing.

Gartner recently predicted that the public cloud services market will grow 18.5% in 2013, which would be impressive for any ordinary business but is significantly lower than what we estimate given the traction we are seeing. In just a year, we have grown to over 200 services for our platform, more than doubled our customer base (now at 250,000) and are seeing an average of 1,000 new customers per day.  In fact, more than 50% of the Fortune 500 are using Windows Azure already. The growth doesn’t stop with customer volume— we continue to double compute and storage capacity every six to nine months and are simultaneously expanding into Japan, Australia and China (operated by 21Vianet).

This growth tells the story of Windows Azure’s durability, staying power, and value across the globe. But so does the increase in usage. With over four trillion objects in Windows Azure and an average of 270,000 requests per second, customer requirements grow and are met daily.  In peak periods, demand can grow to a staggering 880,000 requests per second.

To say we’re humbled and even amazed by Azure’s momentum would be an understatement. Why is Azure growing so fast? Simply put, we’re delivering what customers are asking for—choice and end-to-end support. We understand the diversity of cloud adoption and the requirements customers have for Hybrid application patterns and deployment scenarios. We also know that customers expect support for the entire stack, not just the infrastructure or the application.

Momentum is a good indicator of where we’ve been, and where we’re going.  To that end, I’d like to invite you to see for yourself what we have been up to and take advantage of our free trial.

Steven Martin
General Manager
Windows Azure