A little over a year ago, we announced the general availability of Azure Infrastructure Services. Since that time, we helped customers realize the power of “and” with Infrastructure Services and Platform Services, Windows and Linux, Oracle, SQL and soon SAP – all in one cloud – so customers get the speed, scale and economic benefits of the cloud no matter what they want to do. Today, I’m excited to share that Gartner has named Microsoft as a Leader in its 2014 Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Magic Quadrant report. This comes on the heels of Gartner recognizing Microsoft as a Leader in the Enterprise Application Platform as a Service (aPaaS) market in its 2014 Enterprise aPaaS Magic Quadrant – making Microsoft the only public cloud vendor to be named a Leader for both PaaS and IaaS. 
We have long maintained that customers need choice and flexibility to navigate this mobile-first, cloud-first world and that Microsoft is uniquely equipped to deliver on that by enabling customers to use public, hybrid or private clouds for maximum flexibility and business benefit. For example, they can instantly provision Virtual Machines, apps and services within Microsoft-managed datacenters around the world. Or, they can develop apps using the languages and frameworks they already use without giving a second thought to the underlying infrastructure. Our commitment is to make it easy for customers to take advantage of the cloud on their terms, not ours. This approach is important because organizations have different needs. Offering only one piece of the cloud puzzle isn’t enough to satisfy all the different scenarios in today’s environments and workloads. Being named a Leader in both the IaaS and PaaS Magic Quadrants is incredibly important to us: We believe it validates that a hybrid approach is right and that our offerings today are among the best in both of these important markets. But even more important than today is tomorrow. The world is always changing, and the cloud is no exception. We are committed to helping our customers navigate the evolving demands of tomorrow by simplifying the increasingly complex demands of cloud computing. We took a key step toward the future last month at Build, where we announced a first-of-its-kind portal within Microsoft Azure that blends IaaS and PaaS seamlessly so that customers no longer have to work in multiple, disparate environments, or sacrifice speed, efficiency or choice – bringing the power of ‘and’ to the next level. More than 57 percent of the Fortune 500, including Toyota, NBC Sports and Avanade, and startups like Mural.ly, Fuphie LLC and LiquidSpace are discovering ‘the power of and’. If you haven’t tried Microsoft Azure yet, we invite you to discover what ‘and’ can do for you. *The above graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.