Microsoft is taking a page from rivals in a bid to expand its cloud business, targeting “holdout” businesses that have yet to migrate to the cloud.
Microsoft is currently in second-place in the cloud market, behind AWS and ahead of Google Cloud. The company is taking a more hands-on approach, according to The Information (by way of Seeking Alpha), investing $200 million to establish an acquisition team that will work to bring cloud holdouts onboard.
The strategy is similar that employed by Amazon, Salesforce, and Zoom. Microsoft evidently wants to proactively go after these holdout companies in an effort to sew up their business before the company’s rivals do.
Microsoft already has a major advantage over some other companies, thanks to its ecosystem of software and services that goes back decades. Emulating strategies that other successful companies have been using should help the Redmond giant even more, and may aid it in its efforts to close in on AWS.