over a $10 billion cloud contract with the Pentagon that could change the balance of power in the cloud business.
Here's what they have to say about the differences between the two cloud rivals, and about how Microsoft's effort to vanquish Amazon in this massive market is coming along:Microsoft Azure is much smaller than AWS today but they're demonstrating higher growth rates at a smaller scale. Amazon has a good history and story in serving the web startups, and it moved quickly to commercial customers. Microsoft has a mature and evolved partner model. Microsoft does a good job in enabling partner growth.I'm a little biased because I work with [Microsoft] Azure much more and mostly work with Microsoft technologies. They have lots of really awesome tools. I work with speech services, and there are more options on Azure.
It's completely different markets and customers. [Amazon] AWS is an easy way for customers to get started on cloud. If you're an industrial company and have proprietary secrets, the first thing is to make your data secure. This is where Microsoft will be the right partner.Microsoft is a familiar choice. Microsoft already has sales relationships going back decades.
You'll probably see pendulum swinging type of behavior. Some people might use AWS, and then find something they don't like and move to Azure, and then they'll find out the grass is greener and move back, or vice versa.Competition is good. It's technically not a duopoly now. The mindshare is still with [Amazon] AWS. It's Microsoft's job to win more of the work.