Microsoft's focus on cloud computing and partnerships is paying off.

(Reuters)- In the elevator industry, breakdowns are bad for business.

Thus, when Thyssenkrupp North America needed help predicting when to service its elevators, it turned to Microsoft, in a partnership that illustrates how the software company's chief executive, Satya Nadella, leveraged cloud computing to grow his own business.

A 2014 meeting between the leadership of the US operations of the German company Thyssenkrupp and the newly appointed Nadella led to MAX, a predictive maintenance service built on Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform, which has since been used to connect elevators for 41 Thyssenkrupp customers to the cloud.

Prior to this meeting, the company's relationship with Microsoft largely consisted of renewing its license for Windows software. Since then, Thyssenkrupp's spending with Microsoft in North America has more than doubled, CEO Patrick Bass told Reuters. "Our overall IT spending is decreasing, and yet our capabilities and total spending with Microsoft have increased substantially."

Leveraging the cloud to expand its relationship with clients like Thyssenkrupp has been key to Nadella's strategy, and it has paid off: Microsoft's stock has risen 180 percent since he took over the company, whose market value surpassed $800 billion for the first time earlier this month.

When it reports its results this Thursday, the tech giant is expected to once again disclose exceptional numbers, driven by its rapidly growing Office 365 subscription service and Azure cloud computing business.

His work with Thyssenkrupp illustrates the success Microsoft has had in shifting its traditional licensing model to one that emphasizes partnerships and subscription-based cloud computing products and services.

“Thyssenkrupp has gone from producing things and providing services to selling things as a service,” said Sam George, director of engineering for the Internet of Things (IoT) at Azure. “They’ve undergone a major transformation.”

George said he accompanied Nadella on several client visits. Microsoft has entered into similar partnerships with companies such as Kroger, Starbucks, Chevron, and Adobe Systems.

The company said that 75 percent of Fortune 500 companies have at least three enterprise cloud services from Microsoft, compared to 70 percent with at least two services in 2015.

Since changing the way it reports revenue in late 2015 to emphasize cloud services, Microsoft has seen its Productivity and Business Processes segment, which includes Office 365, go from a 3 percent year-over-year decline in the first quarter of fiscal year 2016 to 28 percent growth in the first quarter of 2018.

The company's Intelligent Cloud growth rate, which includes Azure, increased from 8 percent in the first quarter of 2016 to 14 percent in the same period this year.

More recently, Thyssenkrupp North America introduced the Office 365 productivity suite across all its businesses, while encouraging employees to use Microsoft's Teams collaboration software. The company is also using Dynamics 365 as its preferred customer relationship management software.

Bass said his company no longer uses private data centers and is moving toward eliminating on-premises computer servers. Currently, 50 percent of Thyssenkrupp North America's computing and storage is on Azure, and that is expected to grow to more than two-thirds in the next 12 months.

"We're going to leverage Azure's cloud platform services to the fullest extent," Bass said.