SHARES MICROSOFT SHINE

MICROSOFT CORP shares rose about 5 percent in an all-time high on Friday, after investors  cheered another blockbuster quarter, backed by growth in its legacy software business and Azure cloud computing services.

Shares of one of the technology world's oldest and best known names rose nearly 4 percent to  $108.20 on early trade, adding more than $30 billion to a market capitalisation that was already $802 billion at Thursday's close.

At least six brokerages raised their price targets on the company's stocks after the results.

Helped by a boom in demand for cloud-based software, Microsoft has more than doubled in value since Satya Nadella took over as chief executive  in 2014 and refocused the software behemoth on newer businesses.

While Microsoft's core productivity and business processes  unit, which includes the  Office 365 software suit, rose 13.1 percent to $9.67 billion, revenues for the Azure cloud computing services jumped 89 percent.

"Based on the results, they were able to beat on all  major metrics that people were focusing on. I don't see anything that should raise an eyebrow of concern," said Daniel Morgan, a portfolio manager at Synovus Trust who holds 418,716 Microsoft shares.

Microsoft has been investing heavily to bolster the fast-growing cloud business and catch up with market leader Amazon.com Inc's Amazon Web Services {AWS}.

Microsoft also competes with Alphabet Inc, IBM and Alibaba. According to research firm Canalys,  AWS is beating the competition in terms of  market share,  followed by Microsoft, which continues to grow faster than AWS, as of April this year.

Google was ranked third. [Agencies]