Microsoft has posted its fiscal 2017 Q2 earnings, reporting revenues and net income that both beat Wall Street estimates. The tech giant made revenues of $24.1bn GAAP and a net income of $5.2bn GAAP.

The biggest star to come out of the report was Microsoft’s cloud computing. Revenues here were $6.9bn, an eight per cent increase year-on-year (YoY) – with server products and cloud services seeing 12 per cent increase in revenue. Azure revenue increased by an impressive 93 per cent and saw compute usage ‘more than doubling’ YoY, as it continues to make ground on Amazon’s Web Services.

“Our customers are seeing greater value and opportunity as we partner with them through their digital transformation,” said Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft. “Accelerating advancements in AI across our platforms and services will provide further opportunity to drive growth in the Microsoft Cloud.”

Amy Hood, executive VP and CFO at Microsoft, added: “I am pleased with our results this quarter. We see strong demand for our cloud-based services and are executing well on our long-term growth strategy.”

Revenue in productivity and business process was $7.4bn, an increase of 10 per cent YoY. Office 365 impressed in driving this increase with a revenue growth of 47 per cent. Office consumer products saw a 22 per cent increase, while Office 365 consumer subscribers reportedly increased to 24.9m. Notably, despite late closure of the acquisition in the quarter, LinkedIn contributed $228m in revenue to the unit in just three weeks.

Elsewhere, search revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs, grew 10 per cent – and 11 per cent in constant currency – driven by higher revenue per search and search volume. Bing claims to have an audience of over 524m unique searchers, 59m of which are not reached on Google. Furthermore, users have asked Cortana, which is powered by Bing, more than 18 billion questions to-date

“We’re excited about the Bing Network’s growth and profitability as marketers continue to realize the benefits of Bing and its role as an essential component of any search marketing campaign,” said Steve Sirich, GM of marketing at Bing Ads. “Today’s announcement of an 11 percent rise in constant currency for search advertising revenue reaffirms the confidence we have in our approach to accelerating growth by partnering across the industry and supports our view that a true and competitive marketplace is thriving in search.”

Despite overall success, Microsoft’s more personal computing unit saw a five per cent decrease in revenue – down to $11.8bn YoY.