| Hi, it's Dina here. Microsoft Corp.'s cloud business is on fire, according to the latest results. To some degree, we will have to take the company's word for it. That's because the world's largest software maker doesn't report revenue for a key cloud unit, known as Azure.
At best, this is a head-scratcher that investors must endure as they pour through hundreds of pages of other disclosures in Microsoft regulatory filings, press releases and slide presentations.
At worst, it suggests there's something to hide. If Azure is so great, just share the numbers. It's probably the company's most-important business, so investors would love to see the stats. Amazon Web Services, Azure's larger rival, has been reporting revenue for years. In the absence of real data, Wall Street studies the tea leaves in the information that Microsoft does disclose. Azure sales jumped 62% from a year earlier, the company reported late Wednesday. But off what base? Who knows? In Microsoft's annual 10-K regulatory filings (last count 106 pages), the company reports sales for many product lines including Windows, Gaming, Search Ads and Devices. Still no clarity on the size of Azure. Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said the company takes shareholder feedback into consideration, but it sounds like she isn't planning to change the approach right now. Hood said the way Microsoft reports cloud revenue closely follows how the company sells the products. Big companies rent computing power from Microsoft over the internet, but those enterprise customers also buy other Microsoft services for their own data centers—a hybrid approach that has worked well. And the software maker sells a host of other cloud products to these customers, such as the popular Office 365 productivity suite. "It's how we talk to customers, which is really about the all-up Microsoft commercial cloud value proposition," Hood said. All in, this broader business generated sales of $12.5 billion in the last quarter. While many on Wall Street want to see the Azure number, Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said it would be "a Pandora's box" for Microsoft to start breaking out this revenue because the contracts are complicated and stretch across many different sales cycles. Still, Microsoft has a history of increasing transparency as its businesses grow. If Azure is as critical to the future as the company says it is, then Microsoft should follow its own example. —Dina Bass | 
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