The Structure 50: The Top 50 Cloud Innovators
Microsoft
| Founded | 1975 |
|---|---|
| Investors | Public Company |
| Structure50 Topic | Cloud Provider |
| Description | Microsoft has reportedly said it plans to spend 90 percent — or $8.64 billion — of its $9.6 billion annual R&D budget on cloud computing. |
| GigaOM’s Take | Microsoft’s Windows Azure is unique among large public clouds because of how it skirts the line between IaaS and PaaS. Microsoft is old, but it’s heavily invested in the cloud and has won some big customers around use cases that posit Azure as the cloud version of the Windows desktop OS. |