Last week saw Amazon Inc. once again take center stage in the public cloud, though not because of a massive new price cut or feature rollout for a change. Instead, Jeff Bezos’ company reported its fourth quarter earnings, which included a record $2.41 billion in revenue generated through its infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

The figure represents a 69 percent improvement over the same period last year, an impressive jump but less than the 78 percent increase that Amazon posted in the previous quarter. However, the company more than made up for the slowing top-line growth in its bottom line, which nearly tripled on an annual basis to $687 million. The earnings reaffirm its frontrunner position in the public cloud, but the competition is hard at work trying to close the gap.

Runner-up Microsoft Corp. claimed to have seen a 127 percent increase in the revenue of its competing Azure platform during the previous fiscal quarter. For the time being, however, it’s still far behind Amazon in terms of overall income on practically every major front save the cloud-based productivity segment, where Office reins supreme. Redmond further cemented its lead last week with the introduction of new integrations that allows users to work together in real-time on files kept inside third party file lockers.

The addition aims to ease collaboration across different companies or subsidiaries of the same organization that use incompatible storage services. It’s the fruit of Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella’s ongoing to effort to tap partners for competitive advantage, a strategy that has been proven to be immensely effective by rival Salesforce.com Inc. over in the customer management segment.

Case in point, a startup called Wise.io Inc. last week introduced a new machine learning extension for the cloud giant’s platform that can automatically parse and reply to customer complaints. The software is also able to generate custom response outlines that agents may use in order to reduce the time they spend writing messages. The resulting productivity improvement has the potential to add up very quickly in a large organization with upwards of thousands of users to support. 

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