Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks to participants during the Viva Technologie show at Parc des Expositions Porte de Versailles on May 24, 2018, in Paris Chesnot | Getty Images

Microsoft again gained more market share in the cloud business than top competitors in the second quarter, one technology research firm said. The findings suggest Microsoft is posing more competition to the public cloud market leader, Amazon. They come as Amazon and Alphabet's Google release products that address a key area that Microsoft embraced before they did: "hybrid cloud," which means customers can use a mixture of cloud services and software they run in their own data centers, and manage both with a common set of tools. In the second quarter, Microsoft Azure held 14 percent share in the cloud infrastructure market, Synergy Research said late on Thursday. Microsoft gained 3 percentage points of market share year over year, while Amazon was flat at 34 percent and Google was up 1 percentage point, coming in at 6 percent. Microsoft also had more share gains than Amazon and Microsoft in the fourth quarter and the first quarter, according to Synergy's calculations. (This market is distinct from software-as-a-service, and does not include hosted applications such as Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce, or Workday.)

While reporting second-quarter earnings on Thursday, Amazon reported its cloud generated $6.11 billion in revenue, up almost 49 percent. Microsoft didn't disclose quarterly revenue for its Azure cloud but said Azure revenue grew 89 percent. Google didn't provide cloud numbers or growth rates for the quarter. On Microsoft's July 19 earnings call, Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss asked CEO Satya Nadella about how customers are changing the way they use Azure. Nadella responded by saying that there haven't been drastic changes, but instead, a previously articulated approach, to provide the same tools to run applications in organizations' data centers and in the Microsoft cloud so that companies can move things to the cloud over time, is succeeding.

Microsoft was early

The approach of providing common tools for on-premises and cloud applications is broadly known as "hybrid cloud," and Microsoft's key product there is called Azure Stack, which Microsoft first announced in 2015. "People use both Azure Stack plus Azure, so that continues to drive a lot of IaaS growth for us," Nadella said, referring to the particular category of infrastructure as a service.