Microsoft’s recently announced strong quarterly financial results for the three months to 31st December brought a smile to the faces of many analysts accustomed to hearing only bad news in these uncertain times; and caused the corporation’s share price to increase within days of the news being broken.
Microsoft enjoyed a 5% rise in revenue over the same quarter in 2010 – from $19.9 billion to $20.89 billion. At the same time, the net income for the corporation stood at $6.62 billion, equating to a better than expected earnings per share ratio of $0.76.
Although Microsoft’s consumer sector did not perform as well as the corporation might have wished, its business division appeared to be going from strength to strength; and it was this latter performance, from applications and platforms such as SharePoint, which significantly helped to boost Microsoft’s overall performance.
Revenue from the business division rose by 3% on the previous year, to $6.28 billion. Revenue from SharePoint specifically, combined with Microsoft’s lower capacity collaborative application, Exchange, rose by 10%.
The strength of SharePoint did not come as a surprise to many industry observers, given the platform’s current dominant position in the global documentation and collaboration sphere.
With so many different companies the world over still discovering for themselves features such as the SharePoint Org Chart and the solutions contained in their SharePoint Service catalogue, it is no surprise to many that Microsoft has said it is upbeat regarding the prospects for 2012.
