1 Mln Usd In Azure Cloud There Is 1 MLN USD In The Cloud!

“There are nine million bicycles in Beijing…” – says the line from a song performed by Katie Melua. We don’t have an office in Beijing (yet!), and this is not about bicycles. It is about the number “million.”

There is a lot of buzz around cloud technologies and whether people are actually using them. And we have proof – real businesses are indeed using that cloud.

This quarter, the ever-increasing consumption of Azure cloud by Predica customers has reached over 1 million dollars!

Yes! You are reading it right. Our customers are using cloud solutions and they’ve spent 1 million USD on Azure resources used in these projects.

Spending on Azure cloud

This is most likely not all of their spending. We only have access to data related to projects where we are involved and assigned as the partner of record. Their actual Azure cloud expenses across all projects are much, much higher.

I want to use this opportunity and share some facts with you about how they are using the cloud, what is the geography of this usage, and other geek statistics which we all like to watch (and which, by the way, are provided through the Power BI portal).

The cloud is taking off

You can see it with your own eyes on the chart above. In one year, our customers’ Azure usage has jumped from 0.2 mln USD to almost 1.1 mln USD.

It is a clear sign that cloud projects are taking off and are bringing real value to customers. Otherwise, how would they justify such spending to their management?

Numbers and data we are sharing here are based on 37 subscriptions managed by 19 customers around the world where we are running cloud projects.

Who is using it?

Let’s explore the corporate demographics and geography of our customers a bit. What is the distribution of this consumption around the world?

Azure usage by location

As you can see, the majority of it, approximately 71%, is being consumed by customers in Western Europe. However, customers in Central Europe, which for us means Poland (yay! Go Poland, go!), and in the MEA countries, are catching up.

CEE and MEA for sure have customers generating much, much larger Azure consumption, but we are still looking forward to working with them! If you want to start your cloud journey – make sure to reach out and contact us! We will give you all the information and help you need.

How does it spread across the different ways in which customers are buying Azure? There are multiple ways of doing it – for instance Enterprise Agreement, Cloud Solution Provider (remember, Predica is one of CSP providers) and Open. Let’s take a closer look.

Clearly, enterprise customers are leading the pack here with over 80% of Azure usage being generated by customers in the Enterprise sector.

Azure usage by sector

Azure usage by license type

This is not a surprise, as Predica is very often working with customers who are using Enterprise Agreement as a way to purchase their licensing and cloud resources.

How do they use the cloud?

This is all nice, but can you tell us, how are they using the cloud?

We can’t share all the details of the projects (however, follow our blog, we are posting case studies or pieces of solutions here). What we can share is what kinds of services are being used within these numbers.

What is your bet? Virtual Machines?

Surprise, surprise… it is not infrastructure as a service. Compute workloads are close to position #2.

#1 and the pole position in our customer’s cloud usage is analytics!

Yes, apparently data is powering the world right now, and data analytics is what is keeping all these servers in Microsoft data centers busy at nights.

Azure usage by service

What story do these numbers tell us?

It’s pretty simple. The real power and advantage of the cloud are not in virtual machines but in Platform as a Service (PaaS), and solutions built on top of it. It is where you can take advantage of the cloud platform and the services it provides.

What is the value for you?

OK, you are our customer. You are using a cloud solution based on Azure, and Predica is your partner. We can clearly see the numbers. It is nice. But what does it give you besides that?

Good question!

We have access to these numbers, because we are assigned as a Digital Partner of Record, aka DPOR. What is DPOR? You can read all about it on the Microsoft website.

Simply put, it is a way for you as a customer to point out who is your partner in the cloud journey. Not who is invoicing you, or who signed an agreement, but who is helping you with making things happen in the cloud!

Why is it important?

Let me put my CTO hat on and answer this question for you.

For us as Predica (and any other partner) it has some benefits: it counts towards our partner level, and we are getting some incentives out of it.

Incentives are not that important.

What is important is that it gives us the power to be your advocate in front of Microsoft. We can prove through Digital Partner of Record that we are the real deal. That we do work with customers and we do make things happen!

One call to action for you: If you work with a partner on your solution, please reward them with the assignment of DPOR on your subscription to them. It counts!

It is a journey!

For us, it is not over! We will work on this journey to grow these numbers. Why? Because if these numbers are growing, it means that more and more customers are getting value from cloud platform and we help them with it.

Follow us on this blog and our other channels on LinkedIn and Facebook, and we will make sure to share more solutions, projects and updates like this in the future. And if you want more information now, just contact us!