[ad_1]
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft Corp.
Grant Hindsley | Bloomberg | fake images
Microsoft on Tuesday announced development tools to enhance applications with calling and texting capabilities.
The launch demonstrates one of the ways Microsoft is trying to grow its cloud business by entering smaller individual markets. The company could persuade existing customers to try these tools instead of establishing relationships with smaller software companies.
Microsoft’s Azure Communications Services collection includes application programming interfaces that enable third-party applications to make voice and video calls, exchange chat messages, send text messages, and create phone numbers for incoming and outgoing calls.
Companies like 8×8, RingCentral, and Twilio already offer some of these capabilities. Amazon Web Services (AWS), the largest provider of cloud infrastructure, offers services for developers to embed text messages and video calls into customer applications.
Microsoft executives have said the company will not compete with its own customers. Twilio’s primary cloud provider is not Microsoft. The company relies on AWS for the vast majority of its cloud infrastructure needs. RingCentral uses its own data center infrastructure, while 8×8 relies on a combination of its own data centers, AWS, and Oracle’s public cloud.
If the notion that Microsoft is capable of video conferencing and chatting sounds familiar, it’s because it includes Microsoft Teams, the communication app that rivals Slack and Zoom. The same technology within Teams is now available for use by Microsoft customers, Scott Van Vliet, corporate vice president, told CNBC in an interview Monday. Over time, Microsoft wants to allow customers using Azure Communication Services to connect to Teams, Van Vliet said.
People from other areas of Microsoft, such as the one developing the Azure Active Directory service, expressed interest in using Microsoft’s cloud-based communication services in their own applications, and from there it became clear that Microsoft should expose the technologies more broadly, Van Vliet said.
More than a third of Microsoft’s revenue comes from the Commercial Cloud product group, which includes Azure public cloud, commercial subscriptions to Office 365 productivity applications including Teams, LinkedIn business services, and cloud versions of the Dynamics 365 business applications. Microsoft has sought to grow Commercial Cloud in part by improving its sales processes in specific industries and launching a package targeting frontline workers during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Also on Tuesday Microsoft announced Azure Orbital, a service for processing satellite data. And the company said later this year that the Teams communication app will allow a person giving a presentation to appear in the foreground while the app displays PowerPoint slides in the background.
CLOCK: Microsoft’s JEDI Cloud Proposal Represents Best Value: Pentagon
