Microsoft's new top cloud guy, Scott Guthrie, stepped on stage in San Francisco and rattled off some eye-opening statistics about Microsoft's cloud, Azure.
He was speaking at the Microsoft Build conference happening this week.
The numbers are impressive:
- Microsoft released 300 new features since last year's Build.
- Today the company will release and announce more than 44 new features, he says.
- Last week Microsoft opened data centers in two new regions in China making it the "only global" cloud provider with data centers in mainland China, he said.
- Microsoft will soon have more 16 public cloud regions around the world.
- More than 57% of the Fortune 500 companies use Azure in some way. There are more than 250,000 websites and 1 million databases running on it and it is storing more 20 trillion pieces of data.
- Plus, Guthrie says that more than 1 million developers have signed on to use it cloud development tool, the Visual Studio Developer service, that it launched last November.
Microsoft's cloud also has some huge customers doing big and powerful things. For instance, the game Titanfall runs on Azure. It needs the equivalent of 100,000 computer servers (in geek speak: it uses 100,000 "virtual machines.")
But most impressive of all, is that the online streaming portion of the NBC Olympics was delivered entirely through Azure, setting a record in the process.
The Olympics had 100 million viewers, with 2.1 million watching during U.S./Canada hockey match, which was "a new record" for high definition streaming, Guthrie said.
Rick Cordella, senior vice president and general manager of NBC Sports Digital joined Guthrie on stage to talk about choosing Microsoft.
"NBC bets $1 billion on the Olympics and we have 17 days to recoup that investment. There's no safety net when it comes to putting content out there," Cordella said. "There's no going back if something goes wrong. It's not like you can use a product or company that you don’t trust to pull this off."
Here's the slide that shows off Microsoft's cloud business:
