We’re bringing you ERP Today’s weekly hotlist, featuring our top news picks from the previous week of October.
AWS Q3 results demonstrated higher revenue, but slow sales
Amazon announced its third-quarter financial results, with the AWS cloud platform becoming a key driver of revenue in spite of slowing sales.
For the quarter ended September 30, 2023, parent company Amazon saw overall revenue of $143.1bn, a 13 percent increase year-on-year (YoY), whilst AWS reached $23.06bn in revenue, ending a six-quarter downfall trend.
At the same time, growth didn’t dramatically exceed the previous quarter, falling short of the $23.2bn expectation set by StreetAccount analysts as Brian Olsavsky, CFO of Amazon, explained the AWS turbulence was a result of “optimization headwinds”.
Google’s Q3 missed expectations despite AI flurry
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, announced its financial results for Q3, ending September 30, 2023 with a total revenue of $76.69bn, an increase of 11 percent year-on-year (YoY).
Google Cloud Q3 revenue continued to grow, hitting $8.41bn, an increase of 22 percent, but fell short of analysts’ expectations of $8.6bn and as a result, shares for Alphabet fell more than six percent.
Google Cloud’s continued growth across the last few quarters has been attributed to the company’s ongoing investment in GenAI innovations. In particular, the goliath reported that active AI projects on Vertex AI have grown seven times in Q3.
IBM’s Q3 23 growth driven by software and consulting
IBM announced its third-quarter 2023 results with revenue totaling $14.8bn, an increase of 4.6 percent, up 3.5 percent at constant currency.
The company reported software revenues of $6.3bn, an increase of 7.8 percent, up 6.3 percent at constant currency. Consulting revenue also saw an uptick of 5.6 percent, up five percent in constant currency, with reported revenue of $5bn.
James Kavanaugh, IBM senior vice president and CFO, said: “…Cash generation has enabled us to increase our investment in R&D and acquisitions, strengthening our future AI and hybrid cloud capabilities, while supporting continued shareholder returns through our dividend.”
However, infrastructure revenue seems to have let the company down for another quarter with revenues of $3.3bn, down 2.4 percent and down 3.2 percent at constant currency.
Microsoft showed positive Q1 24 results amid faster cloud growth
Microsoft’s fiscal first-quarter earnings outperformed analyst forecasts led by revenue in Intelligent Cloud rising 19 percent to $24.3bn.
Company revenue reached $56.5bn, increasing by 13 percent (up 12 percent in constant currency) while server products and cloud services revenue were up 21 percent.
Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft, said that Azure, growing 29 percent this quarter, again took share as Microsoft continues to see more cloud migrations.
CFO Amy Hood also explained that in its commercial business, the trends from the prior quarter continued, with solid renewals and higher AI consumption.
Microsoft and Amazon joined fight to diminish tech support fraud
Microsoft and Amazon joined forces with international law enforcement to fight against perpetrators of tech support fraud – the global and industry-wide problem of criminals operating illegal call centers that defraud thousands of victims every year.
The federal enforcement agency in India, Central Bureau Investigation (CBI) announced that it had conducted multiple criminal raids in various cities across India.
This operation was supported by a joint referral made by both Microsoft and Amazon which enabled the exchange of intelligence and insights with CBI and other international law enforcement agencies and taking action at scale.
