Growing at Over Three Million Monthly
Microsoft reported its Q1 FY19 results on October 24 and my comments about the results as they pertain to Office 365 are in today’s Petri.com article. I track these numbers pretty carefully and it’s interesting that Microsoft now uses a six-month period to update the MAU (monthly active user) data. Growth has been pretty consistent at between 2.5 million and 3.33 million over the last few years.
As I note in the article, the easy days of migration are over and the people who wanted to move workload to the cloud are there. Microsoft consistently says that they think that small to medium businesses should use cloud services. This is a reasonable stance for them to take because those organizations will likely get a much better (and more secure) service from Office 365 than they will by running on-premises servers. I think most customers accept this to be the case and those in the small to medium category (which is different from country to country) have largely moved over at this point.
More Difficult to Move The Rest
What this means is that the remaining on-premises base is mostly the larger and more complex organizations that need more support and time to migrate. Some of these organizations will never migrate and will continue to use on-premises servers, which is why they are happy to see Microsoft deliver the 2019 versions of Exchange, SharePoint, and Skype for Business earlier this week as support for on-premises servers now stretches well into the next decade.
Future Growth
Microsoft’s cloud business (powered by Office 365, Azure, and LinkedIn) is already massive and we don’t know how long it can continue to grow at the current rate. All we do know is that the cloud keeps on changing and evolving. Office 365 tenants need to keep their wits about them to track what’s happening in Office 365 (all apps) and Azure Active Directory (all the bits that interact with Office 365). It’s a big task, but that’s why we have the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook!
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