U.S. Firms Embrace Microsoft Clouds as Needs Evolve

Enterprises in the U.S. are quickly adopting Microsoft cloud platforms due to their ubiquity, relatively low cost and easy integration with the company’s other technologies, according to a new research report published today by Information Services Group (ISG) (Nasdaq: III), a leading global technology research and advisory firm.

The 2024 ISG Provider Lens Microsoft Cloud Ecosystem report for the U.S. finds that Microsoft’s vast ecosystem of developers and providers for the Azure cloud platform, Microsoft Office 365 suite, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Microsoft Copilot continues to grow. Partly due to the large number of Microsoft implementations in the country, the U.S. is the leading market for Microsoft cloud services.

“The Microsoft ecosystem is aggressively expanding its capabilities to empower and support companies adopting all Microsoft cloud services,” said Shriram Natarajan, director, Digital Business Transformation, for ISG. “Enterprises are benefiting from providers’ innovation.”

More U.S. organizations are adopting services such as Teams, Azure Virtual Desktop and Copilot as remote and hybrid work become standard, the report says. Microsoft 365 productivity applications have become central to enabling distributed and hybrid workforces, increasing efficiency and advancing digital transformation.

With the low-code/no-code development capabilities of Microsoft Power Platform, many U.S. enterprises are democratizing innovation, ISG says. The rise of citizen developers within business units has been faster in the U.S. than in other regions, blurring the line between business problem-solving and software development, ISG says. Service providers are guiding clients into this new approach to development, ensuring governance and smooth integration of applications into Azure.

For many companies, Azure is becoming the preferred destination for complex SAP environments moving to the cloud, the report says. Microsoft has paved the way for SAP deployment on Azure through advances that include scalable virtual machines certified for SAP S/4HANA workloads and seamless integration of SAP with Azure services.

U.S. enterprises are at the forefront of developing applications that use generative AI (GenAI), with an eye to use cases in areas such as customer service, content generation and analytics, ISG says. Corporate cultures and relatively limited regulation of GenAI in the U.S. make it a center of GenAI experimentation. Azure is enabling GenAI development through new features including Azure OpenAI Service, which gives service providers easier access to large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3, and integration of GenAI with Azure storage, computing and cognitive services.