Microsoft's Enterprise sales force is second to none and they are clearly the number 2 in the cloud space. However, shifting office365 (a SAAS offering) to be reported as cloud revenue is disingenuous.
I wouldn't say second to none as Oracle's Enterprise sales force are better, and likely much better rewarded.
However if you combine the whole package, from sales, product, after sales services, etc. Microsoft is so far ahead of AWS, and Google doesn't know anything about human interaction / Sales.
Cloud is generally accepted as a series of P / IAAS offerings, where clients are paying for infrastructure. Office365 is a SAAS offering, where clients are paying for software that does something, that happens to be hosted in the cloud. In the context of Microsoft's, Google's, Amazon's cloud businesses, Microsoft is comparing apples & oranges to everyone else's oranges.
Sure, I wouldn't argue - everything does live in the "cloud".
People to whom this demarcation of revenue matter, don't care about how topline results are published as long as there is data on the finer points as well (which MSFT does publish).
Also, I just looked at the latest earnings to confirm my last point and they include Office365 figures not in "Intelligent Cloud" but in "Productivity and Business Processes" so what are you all on about?
> SEGMENT INFORMATION
> Productivity and Business Processes
> Revenue increased $1.1 billion or 13%, including a favorable foreign currency impact of 3%.
> Office Commercial revenue increased $598 million or 10%, driven by Office 365 commercial revenue growth, mainly due to growth in subscribers and average revenue per user, offset in part by lower revenue from products licensed on-premises, reflecting a continued shift to Office 365 commercial.
