In 2010, we embarked on a journey to build a cloud platform that would empower organizations globally. In February, we celebrated 15 years of bringing Azure innovation to the world, and today, we celebrate Microsoft again being recognized as a leader in Forrester’s recently published report, The Forrester Wave™: Public Cloud Platforms, Q4 2024. We believe the recognition is a testament to the dedication of countless engineers, developers, and partners who have worked relentlessly to evolve Azure into the platform it is today—one that is trusted by enterprises to drive innovation, scale with confidence, and meet the challenges of an AI-driven world.
Recognized for vision
Forrester’s evaluation assesses public cloud development and infrastructure platforms based on the strength of their current offerings and strategy. The Q4 2024 report underscores the strategic investments we’ve made to ensure Azure is not just a cloud provider but a comprehensive platform enabling real business impact. And today, that means helping organizations around the world balance migration, modernization, and the rapid advancement of AI—all at the same time.
The reported cited key differentiators including Microsoft’s genAI strategy and Azure AI capabilities such as Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Studio, GitHub Copilot Enterprise and Microsoft Fabric, and noted that “Azure is a good fit for organizations seeking quick uptake of AI innovation as well as core cloud offerings for longstanding Microsoft environments.”
Forrester’s acknowledgment reinforces our commitment to continuous innovation and customer success across all layers of the cloud—let’s take a closer look at why we believe Forrester recognized Microsoft as a leader.
AI at the Core: Powering innovation from cloud to edge
Cloud computing has evolved from a solution for scaling infrastructure into a core enabler of intelligence and innovation. Similarly, AI has become an essential business tool to modernize, innovate, and remain competitive. Every app is being reinvented with AI, and entirely new applications are emerging that were never possible before. Simply put—AI is redefining how we work and how organizations operate.
We deeply understand the challenges customers face as they navigate the balance between managing today’s demands and innovating for the future, which is why we’ve made AI a core part of our cloud strategy. By embedding AI across developer tools, platforms, data, and infrastructure, we are building a seamless foundation for the next generation of intelligent applications at scale. A key part of this approach is providing customers with choice and flexibility. For example, we offer one of the most comprehensive collections of open-source and foundation models, with more than 1,800 models available on Azure AI Foundry. In just the past two months, we’ve expanded our model catalog with more than 30 new models from leading partners and continued to advance our own Phi family of models.
Across the AI space, our work spans multiple domains
AI-powered app development
We continue to invest in AI infrastructure, enterprise-grade AI services, and developer tools that drive real business impact, such as Azure AI Foundry and GitHub Copilot Enterprise, to transform how organizations build and deploy AI-powered solutions.
Customers are seeing value in AI-infused application development, intelligent automation, and advanced analytics, with Azure providing the scalable infrastructure needed to integrate AI seamlessly across workloads—from modernizing business processes to accelerating software development. For example, via our strategic OpenAI partnership, we’re delivering their latest models as they launch in near real time, and with AOAI, responsible AI protection and capabilities are turned on by default.
Azure AI Foundry
Launched at Ignite in 2024, Azure AI Foundry is a unified platform that enables developers, IT administrators, data scientists, and others involved in AI development to design, customize, and manage AI applications and agents at scale. It seamlessly integrates with existing workbenches like GitHub, Visual Studio, and Copilot Studio, providing a rich set of AI capabilities and tools within familiar environments. With a simple portal for discovery and management, a unified SDK (software development kit) for agent toolchain access, and robust APIs (application programming interface), Azure AI Foundry streamlines AI development. It also offers secure data integration, model customization, and enterprise-grade governance to accelerate the path to production, and today, more than 60K customers are leveraging these features for their AI transformation.
Enterprise-grade AI infrastructure
Azure serves as the infrastructure that empowers AI—not only for today’s solutions but as the platform for tomorrow’s transformative AI applications. Our strategy is full-stack investment—from developer tools to AI platforms, data, and infrastructure. This comprehensive approach lays the foundation for the next generation of intelligent applications at scale. For instance, we’ve expanded our GPU capacity to support large-scale deep learning models, helping to ensure enterprise-grade reliability for AI workloads. Additionally, we are building the largest scale-up and scale-out infrastructure to support AI training and inferencing, leveraging new architectures like Grace Blackwell and high-throughput interconnects like NVLink and InfiniBand. With these new state-of-the-art technologies, customers get high throughput, reduced latency connectivity to Azure, and highly available specialized infrastructure that helps ensure their AI workloads run smoothly.
Adaptive cloud approach enables flexibility across environments
As Forrester highlights in their report, hybrid and multicloud capabilities are becoming the norm. Organizations operate in increasingly complex environments, requiring seamless integration across public cloud, hybrid, and edge infrastructure to optimize performance, enhance security, and drive innovation. Azure’s adaptive cloud strategy remains a key differentiator, enabling enterprises to unify their cloud operations while leveraging AI, applications, data, and infrastructure in a cohesive, scalable way:
- Seamless hybrid and multicloud operations: Azure Arc extends Azure’s security, governance, and AI capabilities across on-premises, multicloud, and edge environments, providing businesses with a consistent platform for managing resources regardless of their location.
- AI-driven data and analytics: Microsoft Fabric integrates data, analytics, and AI-driven insights into a single solution, empowering organizations to make real-time, intelligent decisions across their entire data estate.
- Scalability across the intelligent edge: Azure’s AI-optimized infrastructure helps ensure organizations can deploy and run AI inferencing workloads at the edge with the same reliability, security, and performance as in the cloud.
With this approach, we help empower organizations to innovate and scale with agility through a cohesive platform that eliminates silos, accelerates innovation, and allows businesses to scale AI and applications seamlessly—no matter where they operate.
Looking ahead with Azure AI
This recognition from Forrester affirms our vision and continued investment in AI, app development, and enterprise-grade infrastructure. For the past 15 years, we’ve been dedicated to building and running the cloud platform that empowers businesses to innovate with confidence, and we’re grateful that Azure has become a trusted platform for all cloud workloads, evolving through continuous innovation and deep collaboration with customers and the Microsoft partner ecosystem.
As we move forward, we remain committed to helping customers scale AI applications with Azure AI Foundry and Azure OpenAI Service, streamline development with GitHub Copilot and Azure Developer Services, and power their data and analytics strategies with tools like Microsoft Fabric.
Our ever-expanding AI infrastructure, including increased GPU capacity, will continue to support advanced workloads, and businesses can continue to customize their cloud journey through our hybrid and multicloud solutions like Azure Arc, ensuring seamless operations across environments.
To read more about Forrester’s evaluation, visit the full report here. To learn more about our latest innovations in AI and cloud and how Azure can transform your business, visit our Azure page or explore our hybrid cloud solutions.
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