Dive Brief:

• About 76% of Apptio customers are using Amazon Web Services, while 52% are using Microsoft’s Azure platform, according to Apptio co-founder and CEO Sunny Gupta, who shared data about cloud adoption trends among its customers during GeekWire’s Cloud Tech Summit this week. "We’ve seen quite a rise in Azure usage," said Gupta, according to Geekwire.

• But more customers are also employing more than one vendor, with 29% of Apptio’s customers now managing multiple cloud environments, Gupta said. 

• Apptio is a technology business management (TBM) software company. Its software helps a company's IT staff better manage business infrastructure technology and track costs, so it keeps a close eye on the cloud market.

Dive Insight:

The multi-cloud model is growing, and Microsoft may be the beneficiary. While AWS is still the clear cloud winner, Microsoft has seen dramatic growth recently. Microsoft Azure grew 93% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2017, according to financial reports released in late April.  

At the same time, more companies are turning to multi-cloud models. It’s possible many AWS customers are choosing Microsoft as their second cloud provider, hence the big growth for Azure. 

Using multiple cloud services can help companies avoid vendor lock in and ensure they have backup if one cloud service is disrupted. A recent survey from RightScale confirmed companies are indeed diversifying, with 85% of enterprises reporting they now have a multi-cloud strategy.