Old news department: Continued growth for SharePoint

A number of things passed me by this summer (yes, there was a reduced work schedule, a nice vacation — back at it now. Look for this blog to return to activity after a quiet summer).

One of the things I didn’t follow closely enough at the time was Microsoft’s earnings announcement at the end of its fiscal 2008.  Joe Wilcox at eWeek noted a 30% year-over-year growth in revenue associated with the SharePoint Server.  This isn’t in the filing, so must have been mentioned during the earnings call.  John Mancini picked this up but I didn’t find much else on it.  Then Stephan Elop, President of Microsoft’s Business Division, in a speech during a financial analyst meeting on July 24th cited fiscal year growth of 35% for SharePoint.

Microsoft claimed $800m in SharePoint revenue (in a press release) last year for fiscal 2007, so 30% growth puts 2008 revenue at $1.04 billion, 35% growth puts it at $1.08 billion.  The company also made a rather vague announcement in March the SharePoint Conference and via a press release that it had surpassed the $1 billion revenue mark.  At that point, we dug into it to find the $1 billion number was for the rolling twelve-month period.

The vagueness of the numbers is because of the difficulty of tracking individual product revenue, particulary when a product is tied to others in bundles.  Microsoft calculates SharePoint revenue by including revenue associated with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, the previous SharePoint Portal Server 2003 version, SharePoint Designer, Forms Server and SharePoint Search. SharePoint Server is sold individually and also as part of Microsoft’s Core client access license (CAL) and Enterprise CAL. So in the latter case, a share of the revenue from those bundles is associated with SharePoint.

All of this means the numbers are inexact to be sure and all licensed SharePoint seats (we haven’t seen an update on this number, from the 100 million claimed earlier this year) are not actively used.  But of course, the numbers are still indicative of SharePoint’s growing adoption, which few question. And many customers use the free SharePoint Services, which doesn’t directly show up in revenue numbers at all.

I suppose Microsoft didn’t make a big deal about it because the growth is in line with what it had already reported earlier in the year.  For others, the fact that SharePoint is a growing business for Microsoft isn’t exactly, uh, news.  Still, official news on SharePoint can be hard to come by so forgive the post if this is too old news, but I thought if I missed it, maybe others had too.