⁍ Microsoft beat Wall Street estimates for quarterly revenue and profit.

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⁍ Pandemic has accelerated a move already under way toward cloud-based computing.

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⁍ Microsoft has shifted to selling many of its products via recurring subscriptions.

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– Microsoft beat Wall Street estimates for quarterly revenue and profit on Tuesday, powered by a slight uptick in growth in its flagship cloud computing business as the software maker continued to benefit from a global shift to working from home and online learning. The pandemic has accelerated a move already under way toward cloud-based computing, helping companies such as Microsoft, Amazon.com Inc’s cloud unit, and Alphabet Inc’s Google Cloud. For Microsoft, it has also boosted demand for its Windows operating systems for laptops and its Xbox gaming services as families work, learn, and play from home, leading to profit that was about 30% above expectations. “It was another healthy quarter, with continued demand for remote offerings continuing to power results,” Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood tells Reuters. Revenue growth for Azure, the company’s flagship cloud computing business, was 48%, up from 47% in the previous quarter and ahead of Wall Street estimates of 43.45%, according to consensus data from Visible Alpha. Hood said the rise was driven by “an increase in larger, long-term Azure contracts.” Microsoft has shifted to selling many of its products via recurring subscriptions, which investors like because it generates stable revenue flows. The value of Microsoft’s future recurring revenue contracts with big business customers was flat from the previous quarter and its proportion of one-time deals rose slightly after two quarters of growth. Microsoft bundles together several sets of software and services such as Office and Azure into a “commercial cloud” metric that investors watch closely to gauge the company’s progress.