Both Amazon and Microsoft reported earnings for the fourth quarter of 2015 today, and cloud computing was a vital part of both reports.
Amazon Web Services is the industry leader, while Microsoft's Azure cloud is widely considered the second-place option, most popular among companies who already use a lot of Microsoft technology.
So how'd they do?
AWS revenues grew about 69% between Q4 2015 and the year-ago quarter, going from $1.42 billion to $2.41 billion.
AWS is also profitable, and profits nearly tripled, from $240 million to $687 million.
It's a little hard to compare apples to apples, as Microsoft does not report its cloud services as a separate business. Rather it lumps Azure into a larger segment called "Intelligent Cloud," which is a bunch of different enterprise products and services.
In its quarterly filing, Microsoft claimed:
Our server products and cloud services revenue grew $153 million or 3%, driven by revenue growth from Microsoft Azure of 127% and higher revenue from Microsoft SQL Server, offset in part by lower revenue from Windows Server.
So Microsoft's overall revenue from server products plus Azure was about $5.1 billion, the vast majority of the "Intelligent Cloud" segment's overall $6.34 billion (the rest comes from consulting and support).
But there's no way to tease out how much of that $5.1 billion is Azure versus the older products. We also don't know if Azure is profitable, althoug the overall business segment earned $2.58 billion in profits — down 1% from a year ago.
Still, Azure is clearly growing sales faster than AWS. Number two is gaining.
