Azure AD and third-party apps: It’s a bigger deal than you might think!

[Alex Simons (AZURE)]

First published on CloudBlogs on May, 01 2017
Howdy folks, Today I've got a new batch of data to share that I hope many of you will find interesting and useful. Those of you who follow the blog know that Azure AD works well with a ton of applications and that our app gallery features over 2,800 pre-integrated third-party apps. (Third-party meaning apps that were written by someone other than Microsoft). But did you ever wonder which apps people use the most? Or how many people use Azure AD with third-party apps? Well today your questions will be answered. Let's start with the top-level numbers.

• In April, 6.7 million unique active users signed into a third-party app using Azure AD. Pretty amazing right? And that number is growing 10-12% every month!
• Those 6.7 million unique active users signed into more than 190k third-party apps ! And that number grows by 10k to 20k apps per month. (Yes, this numbers blows my mind too!)

Those are some really big numbers. They give you an idea of just how big the use of Azure AD as a cloud IDaaS service is. Even more exciting for us is how fast usage is growing, both in terms of the number of unique active users and unique active applications. Let's take a look at the growth in these numbers over the last 12 months:

The number of Azure AD tenants (a good proxy for customers) that have a user using third-party apps is growing at a similar pace:

Now, you might also be wondering: what kinds of apps are these people using?

As you would expect, customers use Azure AD with Office 365 and Azure more than anything else, but they also use Azure AD with a boatload of third-party SaaS apps, custom line-of-business apps and on-premises apps. Many of our largest customers have all of these types of apps integrated with Azure AD. One of our customers already has 1,329 unique third-party applications their employees access using Azure AD! You're probably also curious about which third-party SaaS apps Azure AD users use the most. Here's a chart with the top 15 third-party SaaS apps by usage month for the last nine months:

Pretty cool, right? Who would have guessed that there would be a lot of customers using Azure AD with Google Apps, Workday, or ServiceNow? When we started working on Azure AD Premium five years ago, I hoped this would be the case. It's exciting to see it's happening!

Hopefully this was interesting information, and you found it useful. If we see a lot of interest, I'll start publishing this data on a regular basis. And thanks to our customers for betting on us and making this happen. We really appreciate your vote of confidence and we wouldn't be here without the awesome input and feedback you've given us. Best Regards, Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons ) Director of Program Management Microsoft Identity Division