Fresh from announcing a staggering 97% growth in its cloud sales for Azure, Microsoft has now revealed that BP is using the company’s tech as part of its cloud computing strategy.
The world’s eighth-largest oil and gas company has turned to Microsoft’s cloud to move ‘advanced workloads’ to Azure out of its current data centres.
“The Microsoft cloud provides the hyper scale needed for global businesses like BP to innovate quickly”, says Cindy Rose, Chief Executive of Microsoft UK. “Microsoft Azure will help BP unlock the power of its data to deliver actionable insights in support of their business.”
The move will see BP shift its proprietary data lake to Azure and use the cloud’s services, such as predictive tools for data analysis.
Read more: Microsoft chases down AWS as Azure doubles revenues
“We have been impressed with Microsoft Azure Platform-as-a-Service, and its building block approach, particularly for our advanced workload requirements,” said Steve Fortune, Group CIO of BP.
Microsoft’s cloud business certainly seems to be in a healthy condition given that the company revealed it saw a 15% year on year revenue increase for the unit, with even Office 365 subscriptions now making more than the traditional licensing of Office software.
Nick McQuire, VP, Enterprise Research, CCS Insight said: “As expected, Microsoft posted solid results and continues to fly on all cylinders, especially across its cloud business. Azure’s meteoric rise in particular has been key to Microsoft’s success in 2017 and notably, the grounds for the firm’s recent restructuring. Azure is on track to become the dominant enterprise cloud platform in the industry over the next several years.”
In addition to signing up BP to its cloud, Microsoft also recently revealed that the owner of British Gas, Centrica, is using Azure services to help support its business.
Centrica is moving its UK data centre to Microsoft Azure and is also rolling out Office 365 for collaboration purposes and Dynamics 365 for field services.
The Ministry of Defence, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, and ClearBank are further examples of new and big businesses shifting to the Microsoft Azure cloud.
