Billion Dollar Bet

At its 2007 Financial Analyst Meeting on July 26, Microsoft announced that revenue for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 surpassed $800 M US in fiscal year 2007. This is a growth rate of over 35% from last year.

This success appears to be floating the Microsoft Business Division's bottom line, which increased its revenue by nearly $1.5 billion over the last quarter. The Q4 FY2007 earnings are detailed on Microsoft's site.

There's more information on CNN Money here.

I particularly like this quote taken from Todd Bishop's Blog, at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer website:

The company says the trend puts SharePoint on track to become a billion-dollar product, based on annual revenue.

Something worth noting is that these figures can't take account of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 adoption, which is technically "free" on a licensed Windows Server 2003 installation. I've seen many organizations that are building solutions on top of WSS and won't count directly as generating SharePoint revenue.

However, each successful WSS project is a factor in purchasing and maintaining Office and Windows Server licenses and I feel these projects are just as key to Microsoft's SharePoint platform roadmap as fully fledged MOSS installations are.

Anecdotally, apart from VMWare, I can't ever recall seeing such a rapid take-up and so much enthusiasm for an enterprise product. I think the SharePoint numbers would be even higher, but one of the things slowing adoption is the need for many companies to address their internal business processes and infrastructure, something which they recognize might be lagging, and which a proper SharePoint implementation seems to act as a catalyst for.

Increasingly, standardizing on the SharePoint platform looks like a good bet.