Cloud Hosting

Shares of Microsoft (MSFT) are up 88 cents, or 1.2%, at $73.03, after the company this morning announced a deal with oil and gas giant Halliburton(HAL), in which Microsofts Azure cloud computing service will host the latters iEnergy service for exploration and production.

In response, Credit Suisses Michael Nemeroffreiterates an Outperform ratting on Microsoft shares, writing that the company is moving away from its legacy tools and cyclical PC business."

Among details of the collaboration, Microsoft said it will "allow the companies to apply voice and image recognition, video processing and AR/Virtual Reality to create a digital representation of a physical asset using Microsofts HoloLens and Surface devices, after gathering data fromsensors placed on infrastructure.

Additionally, the companies will utilize digital representation for oil wells and pumps at the IoT edge using the Landmark Field Appliance and Azure Stack, said Microsoft.

Under a headline Not your fathers Microsoft anymore, Nemeroff writes that deals like this one arehelping to diversify Microsoft:

While the economics of this deal were not disclosed, we view these types of announcements and this one in particular, as a prime example of how MSFT is purposely steering its long-term corporate strategy away from its legacy tools and cyclical PC business, and towards the next generation of software technology that will foster incremental productivity gains to create wider competitive advantages for its early adopter customers, which we expect to become technology standards over time. Unlike many of the other cloud platforms that primarily offer commodity-like cloud hosting, Azures IOT edge, machine learning and augmented reality capabilities, bundled together, distinguish Microsoft by offering numerous high-level products and services within its Azure platform that truly enable digital transformations beyond simply exporting data workloads to the cloud, and is the reason why we remain quite bullish on MSFTs cloud strategy which seems to be gaining momentum (Credit Suisse Survey Suggests Inflection Point for Azure).

See the rest here:
Microsoft No Longer a PC Company with Deals Like Halliburton, Says Credit Suisse - Barron's