SEATTLE _ Microsoft beat Wall Street expectations for second quarter earnings, fueled by growth in sales of server software and its growing range of cloud-computing products.
The company, headquartered outside Seattle, posted an adjusted profit of 83 cents a share during the last three months of 2016, beating analyst expectations of an adjusted profit of 79 cents a share.
Adjusted revenue was $26.1 billion, up 2.2 percent from a year earlier.
The company was buoyed during the quarter by sales of server and database software that topped Microsoft's own expectations.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's Azure network of on-demand data storage and processing power, the main challenger to Amazon.com dominance in that field, saw sales rise 93 percent from a year earlier.
The company's Intelligent Cloud segment, which includes those products, reported revenue of $6.9 billion, up 8 percent from a year earlier.
Sales in the company's More Personal Computing segment fell 5 percent to $11.8 billion, a result of Microsoft's near-complete withdrawal from the mobile phone market as the company winds down units acquired from Nokia.
Microsoft has tried to shield itself from its mobile weak spot and a chronically weak personal computer market by reorienting itself toward products delivered over the internet.
Sales in the Productivity and Business Processes segment rose 10 percent, to $7.4 billion, as business sales of web-based Office 365 surged 47 percent from a year earlier.
Microsoft's adjusted earnings during the quarter include $2 billion in sales of Windows 10 that Microsoft technically defers to future years, an accounting practice designed to spread the cash generated by sales of the operating system over the lifetime of the devices it is installed on.
Stripping out those Windows sales and other one-time items, Microsoft's revenue stood at $24.09 billion during the quarter.
Net income, similarly adjusting for Windows deferrals, was $5.2 billion, or 66 cents a share, from $5 billion, or 62 cents a share, a year earlier.
Microsoft sealed its $26.2 billion purchase of LinkedIn in December. The company's results include a few weeks of ownership of LinkedIn, during which the professional social networking firm lost $100 million on sales of $228 million. That dinged Microsoft's overall earnings by about 1 cent a share.
