Jesse Lawrence
One of the key learnings from the current pandemic is that the level and quality of your IT has a huge impact on your resilience, the robustness of your processes and in some cases even on your ability to change to survive. The question is, are you working with the right strategic IT vendors today? Are they able to survive themselves? And if so, are they financially strong enough to continue the heavy investments in the ongoing innovation of their products and services? Relevant questions, right? As a Microsoft Gold partner, we wanted to take a look to see how Microsoft is doing.
Around 2013, Microsoft was regarded as a kind of old-school IT vendor. A big vendor with a strong position and a large customer base, certainly. But, they also were seen as a pretty slow organization, that often responded late to changing market demands. And an organization that was not very effective in creating innovative products and services, despite the huge annual R&D investments.
The appointment of Satya Nadella as the company’s new CEO in 2014 turned out to be the start of a radical change. On the product side he introduced the ‘cloud first, mobile first’ strategy; that was pretty progressive in those days. But Nadella’s best contribution was in the domain of company culture. He challenged the entire organization to move from a 'know-it-all' culture to a 'learn-it-all' culture.
His leadership was effective in the demolition of internal silos and he was a strong promotor of a better co-operation between the departments. Nadella implemented a 'growth mindset' at scale.
The first results of these efforts and new strategies were quickly visible. The pronounced choice for a Cloud First strategy created a huge growth in cloud revenue. Lucrative collaboration deals were signed with former sworn competitors like SAP, Salesforce and Apple. And many of the strong ‘single-category products’ became gradually part of an attractive intelligent cloud platform.
Revenue and profit at Microsoft has grown spectacularly – a good sign that their strategy is working. In the 7 years since Nadella took over as CEO, Microsoft’s market cap grew from $300 billion to $1.9 trillion. That is 6 times as much in only 7 years’ time – an unprecedented achievement!
Today, Microsoft is widely perceived as a real leader in Digital Transformation. The company’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. And that’s exactly what Microsoft does. The company is still the undisputed industry leader when it comes to investments in Research and Development but they also have the guts to act quickly when it comes to acquiring valuable pieces of technology. Strong innovations are brought to the market at a rapid pace, all strengthening the powerful Microsoft intelligent cloud platform. A recent example of product development is the launch of Microsoft Viva, an integrated employee experience solution. Another example is the recent acquisition of Artificial speech tech business Nuance Healthcare for almost $ 20 billion – the second largest acquisition in the company’s history.
So, Microsoft is ready to help your organization becoming a winner of digital transformation in the years to come. Now what are you waiting for?
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