Microsoft Azure revenue jumped 116% in Q1 2017

Microsoft today said that its Azure public cloud saw its revenue go up 116 percent year over year in the quarter that ended on September 30. Compute usage also doubled year over year, Microsoft said.

And now the run rate for Microsoft’s commercial cloud portfolio, which also includes other services like Office 365’s commercial tiers and Dynamics CRM Online and is determined by multiplying the final month in the quarter by 12, is above $13 billion, the company said in its latest quarterly earnings statement.

The performance of Azure in the quarter lines up with Azure’s 2015 third quarter (the first quarter of its 2016 fiscal year), during which Microsoft reported that Azure compute usage and revenue more than doubled. Meanwhile, in the second quarter of this year (the fourth quarter of the 2016 fiscal year), compute use also doubled year over year.

Azure is the No. 2 public cloud out there, second only to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which took in $2.88 billion in revenue in the second quarter, up 58 percent year over year. Google has not disclosed financial information about Google Cloud Platform, which is the No. 3 public cloud.

In the third quarter Microsoft announced plenty of Azure news, including the launch of a public preview of Azure Monitor, a preview of GPU-backed N-Series instances, and the general availability of two new Azure data center regions in the United Kingdom.

Elsewhere in the public cloud business, Oracle launched its second generation of public cloud infrastructure.