Earnings Labs

Microsoft Corporation (MSFT)

Q3 2015 Earnings Call· Fri, Apr 24, 2015

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Greetings, and welcome to the Microsoft Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2015 Earnings Conference Call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. At this time, I’ll turn the call over to Chris Suh, General Manager, Investor Relations for Microsoft. Thank you, Chris. You may begin.

Chris Suh

Analyst · UBS. Please proceed

Thank you. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today. On the call with me today are Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer; Amy Hood, Chief Financial Officer; Frank Brod, Chief Accounting Officer; and John Seethoff, Deputy General Counsel. On our website, microsoft.com/investor, we have posted our press release and a slide deck that provides a summary of our results this quarter. Unless otherwise specified, all growth comparisons we make on the call today relate to the corresponding period of last year. For selected metrics on the call and in other earnings materials, we have also provided growth rates in constant currency. We present constant currency information to provide a framework for assessing how our underlying businesses performed excluding the effect of foreign currency rate fluctuations. Additionally, any mention of operating expense refers to segment operating expenses as defined in the footnote of our 10-Q and includes research and development, sales and marketing and general and administrative but excludes integration and restructuring charges. We will post the prepared remarks to our website immediately following the call until the complete transcript is available. Today’s call is being webcast live and recorded. If you ask a question, it will be included in our live transmission, in the transcript and in any future use of the recording. You can replay the call and view the transcript on the Microsoft Investor Relations website until April 23, 2016. During this call, we will be making forward-looking statements, which are pretty predictions, projections or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could materially differ because of factors discussed in today’s earnings press release, in the comments made during this conference call and in the Risk Factors section of our Form 10-K, Form 10-Q and other reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statement. And with that, I’ll turn the call over to Satya.

Satya Nadella

Analyst · UBS. Please proceed

Thank you, Chris. Good afternoon, everyone. Today, I’ll focus my remarks on our three business areas: Cloud, Windows and Devices. Next week at Build, our developer conference, I’ll share more about our ambitions and how our next-generation platforms will empower every person and organization. This quarter, we delivered $21.7 billion in revenue, an increase of 6% year-over-year or 9% in constant currency. We are seeing the impact of foreign exchange, geopolitical trends in certain geographies and product transitions. We’re taking steps to respond quickly and adjust our plans as needed while we continue to move forward in our transformation. Overall, I’m pleased with our business performance. More importantly though, it’s clear that we are well on our way to transforming our products and businesses across all of Microsoft. The early signs are evident in how our customers are using our products, which I’ll share throughout my remarks today. Our momentum in the cloud is a highlight. Increasingly, customers are choosing Microsoft cloud services to transform their own businesses, going beyond just moving existing workloads to the cloud. These results showcase our ability to transform and perform simultaneously. With that in mind, I’ll walk you through the quarter, starting with our Cloud business. At the core of our results this quarter is incredible growth across a growing portfolio of cloud services. Our commercial Cloud business is a source of strength driven by Office 365, Azure and Dynamics CRM. Our commercial cloud annualized run rate now stands at $6.3 billion, marking the seventh consecutive quarter of triple-digit revenue growth. Office 365 is clearly a key growth driver. Like any cloud service, we track how people are actually using it and we are proud that Office 365 is a vibrant, active service. Right now, there are nearly 50 million Office 365 monthly active…

Amy Hood

Analyst · Philip Winslow with Credit Suisse

Thanks, Satya, and good afternoon, everyone. We are pleased with our execution in the third quarter. In our Commercial business, we continued to see healthy underlying fundamentals with strong renewals of volume license annuity contracts, a mix shift to cloud offerings and solid bookings. Importantly, you can see the progress we are making in the execution of our cloud strategy as the percentage of our revenue from annuity contracts in our Commercial business continues to rise. As Satya highlighted, we also saw momentum in strategic businesses we’ve been investing in, such as Bing, Xbox Live and Surface, which have a key role in our plans to further monetize Windows devices. Like most multinational companies, the strengthening of the U.S. dollar has had a significant impact on our reported results. Accordingly, when applicable, I will give growth rates in both GAAP and constant currency to help you better understand the underlying business demand. Revenue was $21.7 billion, up 6% and 9% in constant currency. Gross margin grew 1% and 4% in constant currency. We improved gross margin percentage year-over-year in each of our segments again this quarter, reflecting our ongoing focus on operational excellence. Operating income declined 5%. Adjusting for both integration and restructuring expense of $190 million, as well as the negative $87 million impact from FX, operating income declined 1%. Earnings per share was $0.61, which includes a $0.02 negative impact from FX and $0.01 of integration and restructuring expense. As a reminder, FX movements first impact our bookings growth and unearned revenue on the balance sheet. Each quarter, our contracted not-billed balance is adjusted to reflect current FX rates. When FX rates move rapidly, as they have in the last six months, bookings growth can be significantly impacted. This was the case again this quarter as bookings grew…

Chris Suh

Analyst · UBS. Please proceed

Thanks, Amy. We’ll now move to Q&A. Operator, can you please repeat your instructions?

Operator

Operator

Thank you. We’ll now be conducting a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Brent Thill with UBS. Please proceed.

Brent Thill

Analyst · UBS. Please proceed

Good afternoon. You had great momentum in the cloud. I was curious if you could just talk about the positioning in both in on trend and cloud environments? And also weave in what you’re seeing with Azure.

Satya Nadella

Analyst · UBS. Please proceed

Sure, Brent. Thanks for the question. Overall when I think about the Microsoft cloud it’s really the combination of Office 365 dynamics as well as Azure. We think about our capital allocation that way, we think about our utilization product architecture and customer value and how uniquely we can bring these three assets together to serve our customers well. And that’s the momentum you see and I talked about the run rate, the usage metrics and there’s really increasing intensity of usage amongst organizational customers in our commercial cloud. One of the other things also is a huge benefit for us is, because our cloud, our public cloud runs on our software assets, our software asset gets packaged up as our servers. In fact, I think of our servers as the edge of our cloud. So the unique capability we now have in Windows Server, SQL Server is becoming that much more competitive. Because we’re running our public cloud in it and that’s what anyone deploying their own private cloud expects to have. And so you see there’s two sides of benefits and two sides for us. One is in our cloud momentum, which itself is the combination of SAS applications, paths , and IADs which I believe is unique in the marketplace as well as with the software itself is packaged up into our private cloud offering be it Windows Server or SQL Server and they’re becoming increasingly competitive in the enterprise and data center additions. And so that’s what you’ve seen in our commercial results, both on the licensing side as well as on the cloud side.

Chris Suh

Analyst · UBS. Please proceed

Thanks, Brett. We’ll move to the next question, please.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Philip Winslow with Credit Suisse.

Philip Winslow

Analyst · Philip Winslow with Credit Suisse

Hi. Thanks. Congratulations on a great quarter. I just wanted to focus in on Office 365 because some of those metrics really jumped out to us. It seems like overall revenue between commercial and E&D for Office 365 is up over 100%. If you look at the consumer user count is up pretty huge this quarter-to-quarter there. The question is sort of about Satya and Amy. Satya when you think about the positioning and sort of where we are in just the adoption lifecycle of Office 365 on the consumer side and then the SMB and enterprise. Where are we in terms of the inflection point there? And then Amy, how should we think about going forward in terms of the guidance that you gave how we should think about the financial implications of where we are in that transition from off-premise to the Office 365?

Satya Nadella

Analyst · Philip Winslow with Credit Suisse

Let me start, and Amy you could take it from there. Overall I would say there’s a secular movement that’s happening in particular with Office 365, quite frankly, it’s happening across the entire product portfolio of Microsoft which is more to what I would described as annuity relationship as well as subscription relationships. Because those of a long-term contracts relationships we want to have with our customers be it consumer, be it small business or large customers. In all the years I’ve been at Microsoft it was always our dream to be able to sell more of the sophisticated capabilities of Office to individual consumers as well as small businesses. But it was hard to do in the previous generation because of the server infrastructure and what I would say sophistication of IT required. Whereas now with the cloud for the first time we now can serve both individuals as well as small businesses with the same kind of sophistication that in the past was exclusively available for the large enterprises. That’s what you see when we see our subscription growth in consumer, we see subscription growth in small business these are folks who never bought a server from us. So that’s what we’re seeing is increasing, what I would call, annuity relationships and subscription relationships with all classes of customers. And it’s new penetration, so it’s not even a one-for-one replacement, even for the enterprise customer there consumption is going up. They may have consumed one or two workloads but now they can have the opportunity to consume the entirety of the portfolio and not just that. If you look at the products in Office 365 that we have, take eDiscovery it’s a complete new space for us where we are able to do things in security eDiscovery enterprise management that we didn’t even do for the top end of the enterprise in the service side, so that’s what we’re seeing.

Amy Hood

Analyst · Philip Winslow with Credit Suisse

And, Phil, on the math that sits behind that, it’s a good timing. Next week at the financial analyst briefing, I’ll send the – and have a lot more time to explain the actual lifetime value of each of these customer segments, especially in Office 365. But I think in consumer, it’s maybe the easiest one to talk about, is that we talked about license growth of 10%, when you correct for Japan. Our ability to quickly, I think, move our customer base through stronger execution, both direct through retail and having our channel execute well and partner with us on this transition. I do think we’ve made a lot of progress. And maybe more importantly, we continue to innovate in the product and deliver value to the end user, which is really what matters. And so I think we’ll be able to show the progress we’ve made over every quarter, and give you some goals going forward. So I look forward to having the chance to spend more time on that in detail. And SMB looks very similar in some ways. They purchased similarly, was bought with a PC, was bought one time, it was infrequent, with an inability, as Satya said, to add workloads. So I think those are some of the bigger transitions you’ve seen for us in terms of being able to increase the value. So hopefully, we’ll be able to give you more details on that next week.

Philip Winslow

Analyst · Philip Winslow with Credit Suisse

I’ve been waiting for those details for years. I appreciate that. All right. Thanks, guys.

Chris Suh

Analyst · Philip Winslow with Credit Suisse

Thanks, Phil. Next question, please, operator.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Keith Weiss of Morgan Stanley. Please proceed.

Keith Weiss

Analyst · Keith Weiss of Morgan Stanley. Please proceed

Excellent. Thank you, guys, for taking the question, and a very nice quarter. I think one of the highlights of the past year has definitely been the expense control, and I guess you could call it, like a normalized OpEx growth of just 1% in the quarter, continues to be very impressive. How should investors, and how should we think about the sustainability of that expense control. Or how long can you keep sort of investing for these growth initiatives, like cloud, yet keep your overall OpEx growth rate so low on a go forward basis?

Satya Nadella

Analyst · Keith Weiss of Morgan Stanley. Please proceed

Let me start, and then I’ll have Amy add. Overall, the core of how I want us to approach expenses is to make sure that we are not limited in our ability to invest in categories where we have unique things to, contribute. So we’re going to do that though, with great discipline, and that’s what I think you’ve seen us do over the course of the last year, and we’ll continue to exhibit that. But at the same time, we will not shrink away from our ability to go put investment, be it in sales, marketing or product R&D, when we clearly have unique things in secular categories of growth. And that’s something that we have the capability of doing, and we want to be able to do that in a disciplined way.

Amy Hood

Analyst · Keith Weiss of Morgan Stanley. Please proceed

And I would just add, I generally think about two key items that we’ve been able to think about, across the leadership team. First is, I think we have exhibited an increasing ability, over the course of the year, to reallocate during the year, both at the organization level and at the team level, to make sure our dollars are going to the highest ROI things. And secondly, I think it’s a general belief held at the highest levels of the company, that operating efficiency increases our ability to be responsive, both to the needs of our customers, as well as innovate faster inside this place. And I think when you take those two things, along with what Satya said, being able to balance disciplined focus and execution for us, I think we feel very good about the progress we’ve made.

Keith Weiss

Analyst · Keith Weiss of Morgan Stanley. Please proceed

Yes. Thank you.

Chris Suh

Analyst · Keith Weiss of Morgan Stanley. Please proceed

Thanks, Keith. Next question, please, operator.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Rick Sherlund with Nomura. Please proceed.

Rick Sherlund

Analyst · Rick Sherlund with Nomura. Please proceed

Thank you. Satya, you mentioned, a year ago, that we’re going to see a next generation of personal productivity software. I wonder if you could update us on what that means. And when we might see that as just an extension of Office 365? Or how do we monetize those products? And when will we hear more about them? And Amy, we didn’t see any tech guarantees in the quarter for the upcoming Windows 10 launch, and we also haven’t heard anything more about changes in accounting for Windows 10, given that there’s going to be a big undelivered element there. Is that something we should expect to hear more about next week?

Satya Nadella

Analyst · Rick Sherlund with Nomura. Please proceed

Sure. Let me start. Thanks, Rick. What I think about even just my own day-to-day usage of Office, even in the last year, it’s gone through a drastic amount of change. Of course, I use Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, on a daily basis. But if I think about all the tools that I’m using, which is all part of Office 365, today, on a daily basis and multiple times a day I start my day as I talked about in many conferences with Dell which is a tool I love which is in fact something that’s uniquely possible because of the shift to Office 365 where we can take organizational data and breakthrough all the boundaries or, again, in silos inside an organization and have people discover information. It’s the richest way for me to visualize what’s happening at Microsoft in real time. That news feed for me is kind of the lifeblood of Microsoft. I use Power BI . One of the things that we talked a lot about is usage. In fact, one of the cultural changes inside the company is everyone from the frontline engineer to the frontline salesperson is responsible for usage. And given that, we want to have these leading indicators showing up in our dashboard not are static reports and Power BI is this rich canvas for us to be able to, one, visualize data as well as ask natural language questions. I look at my own usage of one note in Surface. That’s gone through a fee change both because of the hardware innovation, innovation in Windows, innovation in Office. I look at something like Sway which I’m pretty excited about because basically we’re taking the concept of what is an interactive document and the website and bringing it all together into these Sway documents if you well and if you’re excited about what that could mean in customer service marketing or for school reports. So that’s – we are well into it so that is not going to be waiting for some future date to release anything that’s new, but we’re well on our way with all of these tools and they’re available today and we’ll of course be iterating continuously.

Amy Hood

Analyst · Rick Sherlund with Nomura. Please proceed

And, Rick, on your other two questions specific to the tech guarantee that you would think about the time of year, due to the specific nature of the offer we have on Windows 10, there won’t be a tech guarantee as you think about it for this upgrade cycle and there’s disclosure in fact, in our revenue recognition section in the 10-Q that talks about that specifically. When we talk about the accounting for Windows 10, I will touch on that next week but as we get closer to the launch we’ll go into more specifics. And I’m so excited about the space. I don’t want to miss this one other big scenario which is Cortana , that’s perhaps the thing that’s going to change personal productivity even most and especially with Windows 10 and how Cortana comes to Windows, both to the browser as well as to the start, I think it completely change what personal productivity software mean from a day-to-day experience as well.

Chris Suh

Analyst · Rick Sherlund with Nomura. Please proceed

Thanks, Rick. Next question, please.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Mark Moerdler with Bernstein. Please proceed.

Mark Moerdler

Analyst · Mark Moerdler with Bernstein. Please proceed

Satya, Amy, congrats on the quarter. Thank you for taking my question. So if Windows OEM Pro has now stabilized excluding the bump that we saw from XP Refresh and volume licensing at least in constant currency is stable growing, should we figure that we’ve now started to turn the quarter on commercial Windows revenue? In addition, where do you think we are on the consumer side on the non-OEM front? Is that something that continue to shrink for a bit?

Amy Hood

Analyst · Mark Moerdler with Bernstein. Please proceed

Let me take that one. Satya, you can add at the end of you want. No. I think, Mark, you’re reading it correctly. We actually had our annuity volume licensing business as you know, has been showing growth and stability for a while as we talked about Pro is back to the pre-XP levels and while could see some fluctuation, I think this has been a very stable business for us for a long period of time when you take out that XP bump from last year. Talking about consumer, I think frankly Satya and I both reflected a bit on it in our comments. We do expect to see some additional inventory draw down in front of a launch. That’s not unusual prior to a launch cycle and that will clearly impact our revenue in the quarter. But I think as I look to 2016, I’m excited about the designs we’ve seen, I’m excited about the products that are possible with Windows 10, and I think we feel good and are looking forward to sharing some of that excitement next week.

Satya Nadella

Analyst · Mark Moerdler with Bernstein. Please proceed

Yeah, the one thing I’d also add is there is actually a much more fundamental transformation happening even with how we think about Windows and its delivery and we’ll talk more about this even at our financial analyst briefing next week because I increasingly think about the lifetime value we can deliver to the user of a Windows device be it in consumer or even in the enterprise. And if you think about when we say Windows-as-a-service it’s actually a pretty profound construct which involves us being able to not only think about what ships with OEMs, but how do we on a continuous basis, if it’s a consumer we have things now in the store, we have subscriptions, we have gaming and then when it comes to the enterprise there’s management, security, servicing which is all unique value. So there is going to be an increasing emphasis in the concept of lifetime value that we can deliver to customers.

Mark Moerdler

Analyst · Mark Moerdler with Bernstein. Please proceed

Perfect. I really do appreciate it.

Satya Nadella

Analyst · Mark Moerdler with Bernstein. Please proceed

Thanks, Mark.

Mark Moerdler

Analyst · Mark Moerdler with Bernstein. Please proceed

Thank you.

Chris Suh

Analyst · Mark Moerdler with Bernstein. Please proceed

Thank you, Mark. Next question, please.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of John DiFucci with Jefferies. Please proceed.

John DiFucci

Analyst · John DiFucci with Jefferies. Please proceed

Thanks. Listen, it sounds like Cloud and Azure represents an opportunity to transition existing customers to a Cloud model, but also to expand your customer base or penetrate – or penetration into your current customer base with – I mean incremental business is what I’m talking about. I would think that most of Office 365, because most people were already on Office, represents transition from life to license model, but so far, and I know it’s still early, but so far what about the rest? Can you give us an idea of how much of this is new business and how much of this is transition business?

Satya Nadella

Analyst · John DiFucci with Jefferies. Please proceed

Let me start and then you can add. I mean I think you have to sort of look at all the use cases. In fact as I said, a lot of the Azure use case, I think you referenced this, have been non-zero-sum because our people started building their mobile back end, web back end using Big Data not workloads we have. I look at sort of everyday usage growth, even if they’re creating a web workload it’s for a very different type of web back end and a mobile back end. And the same thing with advanced analytics. I even look at the growth of virtual machine instances on Azure. We not only see Windows Server obviously but we see 20%-plus of Linux growth. So that’s again non-zero-sum . So there’s significant traction we have in terms of moving beyond just one-for-one shift of a workload that traditionally ran on our server to our Azure Cloud. In fact if anything the majority of what we are seeing is new. Even in Office 365 it’s not just one-for-one shift. Of course if you are – were using as a large enterprise Exchange and you moved to Office 365 you moved to using Exchange Online; same thing is true for SharePoint. But again take all the other things I described, power BI , Dell and the list goes on, take eDiscovery; even for the largest of enterprise these were things that had low penetration or low deployment. And so we are seeing increasing usage of that. Same thing with our Dynamics business. EMS , it’s completely a new category. We never had that kind of a management footprint. We now have the ability to have one control plane for IT for all the devices, identity management, device management, data protection. That’s a new workload. So that’s what we’re seeing. We definitely are seeing one-for-one migration, but the opportunity in everyone one of our offerings from Office 365 to Dynamics to Azure has a non-zero-sum component to it.

John DiFucci

Analyst · John DiFucci with Jefferies. Please proceed

Thanks, Satya. Just want to be clear because you said something, I mean other than Office 365 did you say the majority of the Cloud business is new business? Or – and again, I know it can’t be – I mean maybe you know exactly what it is but I’m sure some of it is somewhat cloudy or – no pun intended, or vague, but do you think most of it at this point is new business? Is that what I heard you say?

Satya Nadella

Analyst · John DiFucci with Jefferies. Please proceed

Yeah, and also it sort of comes in interesting ways because one of the things IT, as you know, it’s not about sort of replacing what you have, it’s always augmenting what you have. A very classic scenario would be I’ll take a SQL database application, bring it to the Cloud and then build a new mobile back end using the same data. So reuse of code, reuse of data, so you would use some amount if iOS infrastructure and then past consumption. So that’s one of the very typical enterprise solutions you will see. In fact, our own IT Systems, take what we have done with our HR and our financial systems and some of those things as they move to the Cloud, we bring some existing and then add to it.

Amy Hood

Analyst · John DiFucci with Jefferies. Please proceed

And, John, to your specific question, you’re right. A lot of the Azure is, the good way to think about that is new; and especially our Dynamics business, CRM online and some of the work we’ve done across AX is certainly all new. And the lower down in the segment of Office you get, the more new it is, is the way to think about it.

John DiFucci

Analyst · John DiFucci with Jefferies. Please proceed

Great. Thank you very much.

Chris Suh

Analyst · John DiFucci with Jefferies. Please proceed

Thanks. Next question, please.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Walter Pritchard with Citi. Please proceed.

Walter Pritchard

Analyst · Walter Pritchard with Citi. Please proceed

Hi. Just a follow up to the question John had on Azure. Amazon released their profitability for the first time on AWS and it was I think higher than most people were expecting. I’m wondering how we should think about your mix of business in Azure? You’re running Linux, you’re running a lot of services based on open source software, you’re also running some of your own IP there. How should we think about where your margins are today and should we think of Amazon’s AWS margins as a good benchmark for where you could be at like sort of scale they’re at today?

Satya Nadella

Analyst · Walter Pritchard with Citi. Please proceed

First of all, I don’t think that of the comparison between Azure and AWS is the true north for me. I think about the Microsoft Cloud because even the way we do capital, the way we measure utilization is all with the complete unit, which is of course all of Office 365 runs on Azure, Azure AD powers all of our Cloud, so it’s really its entirety that we think of as our unique value. So that means we have SaaS which is a huge component between O 365 and Dynamics, PaaS which is a huge component of Azure itself. We see many customers who would use even our PaaS services and even AWS. So we – for example, you can in fact do a single sign-on using EMS and Azure AD in Azure and use – so your resources on AWS. And then of course we have our iOS business. So that’s how we think about it. And then it’s reflected even in our margins. So when we look at our Cloud margins, they will have our revenue quality, which is very different; that’s a combination of past iOS and SaaS. And that’s how we want to make sure we make progress, because that’s where both product value which is unique to us and also the quality of revenue that’s unique to us. But the one other thing that I – see my world view is not that all compute storage networks just goes to one place. That’s why I think of our servers as the edge of our Cloud, and as I said there’s a huge software asset in there which is becoming increasingly competitive. Of course we don’t count that in our run rates or when we talk about our $6 billion plus run rate, that’s just pure public Cloud number and that’s fantastic to see and we want to measure it that way. But quite frankly if you sort of looked at what’s broadly happening in the Cloud transition, we are participating in both the private hybrid Cloud as well as the public Cloud.

Chris Suh

Analyst · Walter Pritchard with Citi. Please proceed

Thanks, Walter.

Walter Pritchard

Analyst · Walter Pritchard with Citi. Please proceed

Amy on OpEx, you have – I guess not necessarily you but the company generally at this time has given some color into the next fiscal year’s OpEx. Is that something we should expect at the Build event with your Analyst Meeting next week? Or any – I’m sure you’re not going to give it to us today but – or right here, but just wanted to figure out expectations around when we should hear about that?

Amy Hood

Analyst · Walter Pritchard with Citi. Please proceed

We’ll continue to talk generally about it. I don’t expect to give specific guidance on FY 2016 next week.

Walter Pritchard

Analyst · Walter Pritchard with Citi. Please proceed

Okay.

Amy Hood

Analyst · Walter Pritchard with Citi. Please proceed

Okay, Walter.

Walter Pritchard

Analyst · Walter Pritchard with Citi. Please proceed

Thank you very much.

Chris Suh

Analyst · Walter Pritchard with Citi. Please proceed

Thanks. We’ll go to the next question, please.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Heather Bellini with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed.

Heather Bellini

Analyst · Heather Bellini with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed

Great. I had two questions. One was related to the success of the sub 250 machines that you guys in the market have been seeing and just what geos have seen the best uptake for those so far? And then just, if there is a little bit more color you can share about the drivers of the commercial licensing business and I’ve recognized all the affiliate that you guys just gave guidance for Q4. But as kind of as we look out over the next year or two, what are the big puts and takes in particular maybe on the server and tool side that we need to think about?

Satya Nadella

Analyst · Heather Bellini with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed

I’ll start. I think as far as the low-cost devices, it’s pretty broad. I think we think of the U.S. itself being in fact a big driver of some of the growth on the consumer side. We’re also obviously – stimulated this so that we can be much more effective even in the educational markets worldwide. And Amy can add to that if we had any more detail on it. When it comes to our Commercial Licensing and our servers, it’s the same trend, Heather, which is the big shift that’s happening is our enterprise and datacenter products, being Windows Server, Systems Centers , SQL Server, are more competitive. It’s the same thing that I would say at least in the last couple of years clearly have played out. There is clearly – and in fact, as our products have become competitive there’s been this mix shift. People have bought from us previously just standard editions are able to now look at our enterprise editions and that’s what’s playing out. And there’s definitely some pricing action we were able to take, but mostly because we were able to deliver this incremental value. And even with all the pricing action we took, we, from a total cost of ownership or just raw pricing perspective are very competitive versus what’s available in the market. So that’s what we see. And so the cycle some of the pricing actions obviously were anniversary out, but the overall thing that I’m focused on is how can we continue to run our software asset ourselves in public cloud and translate that into our servers. And really paint this vision and make it a reality of hybrid computing and drive the secular growth of that.

Amy Hood

Analyst · Heather Bellini with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed

Thanks, Heather.

Chris Suh

Analyst · Heather Bellini with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed

We’ll have time for one more question, please.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our last question comes from the line of Mark Murphy with JPMorgan. Please proceed.

Mark Murphy

Analyst · JPMorgan. Please proceed

Yeah, Satya, I’m wondering what inning do you think we are in terms of building out the next generation data centers but you’ll need to support the commercial cloud. For example, do you think you’ve built out data center capacity to support the commercial cloud business all the way to a $10 billion dollars run rate or $20 billion run rates? So if there’s any way you can help us to try to gauge how much overhead you have in the capacity. And perhaps what type of data center footprint you envision a few years down the road.

Satya Nadella

Analyst · JPMorgan. Please proceed

In fact, one of the big changes that has happened I would say in the last couple of years, and I’ll have Amy even detail out. It’s the way we’re going about everything from the very long lead things like actual data center locations and Build out to the procurement of individual machines, and essentially the work in progress inventory of that. We have driven significant process improvement to essentially make it as efficient as one can make it and that’s a continuous process for us. So when I think about even the capital allocation per quarter we very carefully look at what is our current utilization forecast, and what our demand forecast is. And we now have the ability to be much more dynamic. Surely there are some things which are long lead like data center location. But you don’t need to build out data centers much before they’re really being utilized. And so we have a very good process and that’s a place were quite frankly a lot of the proprietary advantage of someone who is an at scale public cloud provider, not just with one application. And this is where the huge distinction is. After all we did run large-scale consumer services ourselves between Xbox LIVE and Bing. But this business of supporting a highly geo distributed enterprise cloud business is very different than just running in one at scale public cloud service. And we learned a lot with what is our workload diversity as well as our geo-diversity. And our supply chain management is optimized for it.

Amy Hood

Analyst · JPMorgan. Please proceed

Yeah, I would just add Mark. This is a place as Satya said we have made a lot of progress in being data-driven. This is down to a monthly review by workload, by property, by geo. And this is a place where I feel that we are in it terrific position frankly to respond to data sovereignty demands, changes politically and our ability to execute that to provide what our customers demand in terms of security and manageability and location. It’s something that we also care a lot about.

Mark Murphy

Analyst · JPMorgan. Please proceed

Thank you.

Chris Suh

Analyst · JPMorgan. Please proceed

Thanks. Mark.

Chris Suh

Analyst · JPMorgan. Please proceed

So that wraps up the Q&A portion of today’s call. We encourage you to tune into Build, our Annual Developer Conference which will be webcast live at to be www.buildwindows.com as well as our Financial Analyst Briefing on Wednesday, April 29, which will be webcast live on our Investor Relations website. We look forward to seeing many of you in the coming months at various Investor Conferences. Thank you for joining us, and talk to you soon. Goodbye.

Satya Nadella

Analyst · JPMorgan. Please proceed

Thank you.

Amy Hood

Analyst · JPMorgan. Please proceed

Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. This concludes today’s teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.