Microsoft Corp beat Wall Street estimates for quarterly revenue and profit on Tuesday, powered by a slight uptick in growth in its flagship cloud computing business as the software maker continued to benefit from a global shift to working from home and online learning.

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The pandemic has accelerated a move already underway toward cloud-based computing, helping companies such as Microsoft, Amazon.com Inc’s cloud unit and Alphabet Inc’s Google Cloud. For Microsoft, it has also boosted demand for its Windows operating systems for laptops and its Xbox gaming services as families work, learn and play from home, leading to profit that was about 30 percent above expectations.

”It was another healthy quarter, with continued demand for remote offerings continuing to power results,” Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood told Reuters in an interview.

Revenue growth for Azure, the company’s flagship cloud computing business, was 48 percent, up from 47 percent in the previous quarter and ahead of Wall Street estimates of 43.45 percent, according to consensus data from Visible Alpha. Hood said the rise was driven by ”an increase in larger, long-term Azure contracts.”

Microsoft has shifted to selling many of its products via recurring subscriptions, which investors like because it generates stable revenue flows. The value of Microsoft’s future recurring revenue contracts with big business customers was flat from the previous quarter and its proportion of one-time deals rose slightly after two-quarters of growth.

Microsoft bundles together several sets of software and services such as Office and Azure into a ”commercial cloud” metric that investors watch closely to gauge the company’s progress in selling to large businesses. Microsoft’s commercial cloud gross margins – a measure of the profitability of its sales to large businesses – was 71 percent, compared with 66 percent a year earlier.

Hood said some of the rise was explained by a change in accounting rules for Microsoft’s servers, but the better margins were also driven by sales of lucrative software such as Dynamics 365, which competes with Salesforce.com. ”That Dynamics 365 revenue growth of 38 percent was better than we thought and quite good,” Hood told Reuters.

Microsoft said 93 percent of commercial cloud products were sold as subscriptions, compared with 94 percent the quarter before. The company’s remaining performance obligations – a measure of how much revenue has been booked for the future in sales contracts but not yet formally recognized as revenue – stayed flat at USD 107 billion in the fiscal first quarter but was up from USD 86 billion a year prior.

Microsoft said revenue in its ”Intelligent Cloud” segment rose 20 percent to USD 13 billion in the first quarter, with 48 percent growth in Azure. Analysts had expected revenue of USD 12.7 billion, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.

Revenue from its personal computing division, which includes Windows software and Xbox gaming consoles, rose 6 percent to USD 11.8 billion.

The company’s revenue rose 12 percent to USD 37.2 billion in the quarter ended Sept. 30, beating analysts’ estimates of USD 35.72 billion.

”Microsoft’s strong earnings beat shows its market share in cloud computing is expanding while its legacy software products such as Windows and Office are in great demand during the pandemic,” said Haris Anwar, senior analyst at Investing.com. Net income rose to USD 13.89 billion, or USD 1.82 per share, from USD 10.68 billion, or USD 1.38 per share, a year earlier. Analysts had expected a profit of USD 1.54 per share.

Microsoft shares were down 0.2 percent at USD 212.77 in after-hours trading after the results, although trading is often relatively muted until after Microsoft executives give financial guidance. The company will hold a conference call later on Tuesday.