Despite market concerns that businesses may cut back on technology spending in the face of an economic downturn, Microsoft executives said they were bullish on the future as more corporate customers moved to the cloud.

“I see long-term, secular growth opportunities,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said in a call with Wall Street analysts.

Here are three major reasons for that optimism.

Microsoft’s cloud products are getting better

Microsoft’s offerings used to lag far behind Amazon’s. But as Mr. Nadella has thrown his company’s weight behind a transition to cloud computing, Microsoft has been catching up on the product front. Microsoft is just a year behind Amazon now, and it has some advantages with large customers, said Keith Weiss, an analyst at Morgan Stanley.

In a Morgan Stanley survey of 100 chief information officers, almost 40 percent said Amazon was best positioned among tech providers to gain share as companies moved to the cloud in 2019, with more than 30 percent saying Microsoft was best positioned. In three years, though, they expect the advantages to Amazon and Microsoft to be about equal, they said. They saw Microsoft catching up in key areas including security as well as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Amy Hood, Microsoft’s finance chief, said the company had seen larger and longer customer commitments.