Outages, runaway costs and frustration with tech support have hurt Microsoft’s cloud in the eyes of its customers, says analyst firm Gartner (MSFT)

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Microsoft’s cloud computing business, Azure, has been on a tear.
But a recent report from market research giant Gartner finds that this growth has also caused some heartburn for its customers.
Customers have suffered from too many outages, projects that run over time and over budget, and from frustration with technical support, Gartner says.
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Microsoft is a bona-fide cloud computing giant these days.

While it is still considered the second-place player in terms of market share against leader Amazon Web Services, most large companies today are using more than one cloud provider.

And when they do, the most common combination is AWS and Azure (although, as we previously reported, the distant number-three Google Cloud is just starting to show up in that mix a bit).

Read: There’s a growing list of signs that new CEO Thomas Kurian is starting to make Google Cloud more successful with big companies

Microsoft is particularly winning business from its own enormous cadre of enterprise customers — the companies that already use its Office software, Windows Server, databases, Active Directory or other popular products designed for corporations and other large entities, according to market research giant Gartner.

The company is doing a good job convincing its customers to move their Microsoft-related IT apps and data to Microsoft’s cloud, and once there getting customers to try more of its cloud services.

Gartner particularly praises Microsoft for its Internet of Things (IoT) cloud, where the data from sensors embedded on lots of devices can be tracked and analyzed. And Gartner applauds Microsoft Azure for its open arms towards partners, even those that have historically been competitors. Azure has brought in Red Hat, VMware, NetApp, Cray Computer, and a lot of open source software to its cloud.

But Gartner has dinged Microsoft Azure’s overall standing in the market this year. While it’s still ranked as the number-two player, the market researcher has downgraded Microsoft as farther behind AWS this year than last.

The downtime problem

Top among Gartner’s criticisms is too much downtime.

"Microsoft Azure’s reliability issues continue to be a challenge for customers, largely as a result of Azure’s growing pains. Since September 2018, Azure has had multiple service-impacting incidents, including significant outages involving Azure Active Directory. The nature of many of these outages is such that customers had no controls in order to mitigate the downtime," the report says.

For instance, in May, Azure had a global outage that lasted nearly two hours. In February, Microsoft accidentally deleted some database records as part of a mass outage. It later restored nearly all the deleted records.

Azure’s reputation for outages has grown so serious that earlier this month, a top Microsoft exec publicly promised changes in the engineering team to improve the situation. He also apologized for three big outages that occurred since September, including the one in May.

More expensive than anticipated

But Gartner has found another interesting problem, with some Azure customers complaining about cloud projects that take too long to implement and run over-budget. This is intriguing because cloud computing has historically been hailed as the faster, less expensive alternative than classic IT, where companies buy the software and hardware and hire consultants to help them with custom coding and installation.

(Those classic enormous projects were renowned for running past deadlines and budgets and generating their fare share of lawsuits by frustrated customers.)

Gartner points fingers as Microsoft’s overzealous Azure sales teams, who are creating "unreasonably high expectations for customers."

The market researcher says this has downstream consequences because customers "frequently lament the quality of Microsoft technical support." They also aren’t happy when their costs for technical support increase. Ergo, "this negatively impacts customer satisfaction, and slows Azure adoption and therefore customer spending," Gartner says.

Now read: Microsoft chairman John Thompson explains why CEO Satya Nadella is poised to win the cloud wars

Despite these growing pains and the kick in the shin from Gartner, there are a lot of indications that Microsoft Azure is queued up for a big growth spurt.

As we previously reported, a lot of Microsoft’s customers are being force to give up old versions of Windows, as well as old versions of its database, as support for these software products end. And Microsoft’s salesforce and partners will be offering good deals to jump to the Azure as part their upgrade.

That’s all good news for Microsoft, especially given that Azure growth is showing signs of decelerating — though that may just be a function of maturity, and experts don’t seem especially worried about it.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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