"Business demand for our productivity and infrastructure products and cloud solutions is strong," said Kevin Turner, chief operating officer at Microsoft, in a .

Strong sales of business software were reported by other IT bellwethers this week. SAP, for example, that quarterly revenue rose 27 percent in the fourth quarter to €4 billion (US$5.3 billion).

Dragged down by legal costs related to litigation with Oracle over its former TomorrowNow unit, SAP profit declined by more than 33 percent to €437 million. But aside from the extraordinary legal costs, SAP's business software sales and related services appear to be going strong. The maker of ERP (enterprise resource planning) and analytics applications said software revenue increased 35 percent to €1.51 billion while software and software-related service revenue rose by 28 percent to €3.27 billion.

EMC, another enterprise software stalwart, on Tuesday due to strong sales for its storage, security and virtualization products. EMC's consolidated revenue, including that of its VMware unit, rose 19 percent to a record US$4.9 billion. VMware itself on Monday in the same quarter.

Outside of the enterprise IT sector, results were a bit mixed.