Lync, Microsoft’s little engine that could, continues to grow.
The company announced at the end of its last fiscal year (2013) that Lync had brought in more than $1 billion in revenue. The group had grown more than 30 percent in the fourth, third, and second quarters of Microsoft’s fiscal 2013.
Microsoft put up a flag stating that Lync was its “fastest growing business” in celebration. In terms of its fit as a cloud service into Microsoft’s larger shake up of its business plan, Lync matters. It, along with Office 365 and Azure, are a rising cadre of internal projects that are straining to replace slipping Windows revenues.
Right, so Lync is big, and grew quickly to cross the billion-dollar mark for fiscal 2013. What’s happened since? Well, much the same, it appears. Microsoft announced today that Lync grew 29 percent (compared to the year-ago quarter) in the fourth calendar quarter. That’s below the 30 percent mark that Lync had kept up for so long, but that matters only so much, as the raw dollar revenue growth is more important, provided the comparative percentage delta doesn’t fall too much.
Put another way, 29 percent more of something bigger is larger than 31 percent more of something smaller.
Also out today at the company’s Lync conference is the news that Microsoft will release a new Lync app for Android tablets. It won’t be ready until summer, so hold your equestrian mounts.
I’m keeping you up with Lync because it is a test for Microsoft to sell new(er) services to its enterprise client base. The company expects to find much of its future revenue growth in such terms, so the product matters as bellwether.