No matter what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says the company's new mission is — to vaguely empower people "to achieve more" — he's focused on one thing: owning cloud computing.
Not only is Microsoft competing head-to-head with market leader Amazon to encourage programmers and corporations to run their apps on Microsoft's cloud service, it is also rolling out all kinds of its own apps on its own cloud and selling those. This is beyond Office 365 (its cloud version of Microsoft Office) and Microsoft Dynamics (its cloud sales app, that competes with Salesforce).
One of those cloud services is called Enterprise Mobility Suite, and on Wednesday, speaking at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference in Orlando, Florida, COO Kevin Turner told the company's thousands of of resellers that he thinks this product will become a billion-dollar business in the future, reports CRN. He wants them to be selling it now, and adding their own apps, services on top of it.
Enterprise Mobility Suite is a combination of three of Microsoft's cloud services:
- Azure Active Directory Premium, which manages passwords for employees for Windows and for thousands of other cloud apps, and can help a company detect if its being attacked
- Microsoft Intune, which manages and protects the mobile devices themselves, from Windows PCs and laptops to Android/iOS/Windows smartphones
- Azure Rights Management, which can password protect the data itself so sensitive documents can't be seen by unauthorized people.
Each of those can be sold separately for $6/employee per month but Microsoft bundles them together for $7.60/employee per month.
That seems to be be a winning combination so far. In April, when Microsoft announced earnings, Nadella told analysts that Enterprise Mobility Suite is growing fast and had at that time more than 13,000 enterprise customers.
He used it as an example of one of the "premium" services where Microsoft can profitably zoom ahead of the competition in the cloud, without getting dragged into the "race to zero" price wars going on in other areas of cloud computing between Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
That said, there's a lot of competition in all areas of software and mobile management already, including established companies like SAP, IBM and VMware, and specialists in the market with a more specific mobile or cloud focus, like Good Technology, MobileIron, and Okta.
