Microsoft Says It's Off To 'Good Start' With Q1 Results

For its fiscal first quarter, Microsoft's net income was $5.74 billion, or 68 cents per share, up from $5.4 billion and 62 cents per share during last year's quarter. Microsoft's Q1 revenue was $17.37 billion, up from $16.2 billion during the year-ago quarter.

"We are off to a good start for the year," Microsoft CFO Peter Klein said in the call.

Revenue for the Microsoft Business Division was $5.62 billion was up 8 percent from last year's quarter, while Microsoft's Server and Tools Business posted revenue of $4.25 billion, up 10 percent from last year.

Klein said Microsoft's services business is seeing an uptick as more customers begin investing in cloud infrastructure.

"We're really seeing healthy demand for our consulting services to help people architect and deploy our next generation of products," he said. "People are really investing in their data centers and in private cloud."

Microsoft's Windows and Windows Live division revenue was $4.87, up 2 percent. Microsoft also surpassed the 450 million mark in Windows 7 license sales, CFO Peter Klein said during the call.

Microsoft last month released a developer version of Windows 8 , and expectations are that it will launch Windows 8 sometime next year.

Microsoft closed its $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype last week, and in a Q&A after the call analysts peppered Klein and Bill Koefoed, general manager of investor relations, with questions about what's next. Klein said Microsoft plans to integrate Skype into many of its products, including Lync, Windows Live Messenger and Windows Phone

"Folks are in the building as we speak working hard on [integration] planning," Klein said.

Microsoft, which will begin including Skype's results next quarter, issued operating expense guidance of between $28.6 billion and $29.2 billion.

Microsoft shares were down 18 cents Thursday to $26.86 in after hours trading.