Today we are excited to announce, Office 365, a new brand of cloud services that I believe will lead customers to increase their adoption of cloud services. For the official news of the day, I recommend you visit our event site. Go sign up for the BETA!
Over the last couple of weeks we’ve announced several new customers including DuPont, Godiva, The State of Minnesota and State of California have all decided to join existing BPOS customers such as GlaxoSmithKline, McDonalds, Starbucks, and American Express.
In fact, the number of businesses using our existing BPOS solution has more than tripled since the beginning of this year and we have companies as small as 5 users up to hundreds of thousands of user organizations relying on Microsoft as their trusted partner in the cloud.
Complete Offering
Today’s announcement means customers will have access to our software in a way which completes our vision to ‘light up’ the best end user tools with the best set of server products on the market.
In fact the value of Union brings the capability which other vendors treat as distinct software markets into one complete offering for your business.
Considering that the on-premises versions of these products consistently rank as a leader (upper right quadrant) in related Gartner Magic Quadrants, you can understand why customers of all sizes will be excited about the opportunity to gain access to such powerful set of tools.
Upper Right More of the Time
Gartner Inc., one of the world’s largest and most influential industry analyst firms, is a trusted source for IT decision makers in all industries. One of Gartner’s best known research methodologies is the “Magic Quadrant” which assesses a market and its participants (vendors) to help customer identify a short list of vendors for consideration.
According to Gartner, “Assessing a market and its participants is a daunting task. Vendor differentiation caused by differing sizes, levels of complexity and strategies can inhibit comparisons of vendor offerings, and the market's overall direction is often murky. Gartner's Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes solve these problems by offering snapshots of markets and their participants, enabling you to map vendor strengths against your current and future needs.” You can read more here.
Products such as Microsoft Office, SharePoint, Exchange, Lync and BPOS, participates in 16 relevant Magic Quadrants, ranging from Business Intelligence to Unified Communications to Social Software and more.
This year, Gartner placed Microsoft’s products in the Leader’s quadrant – the highest possible ranking within these reports, in 11 of these categories, highlighting the confidence Gartner analysts have in Microsoft products and solutions. The 16 categories and 11 ‘Leader’s Quadrant’ designations include (bold means available with Office365):
If you want to get more information about Gartner Magic Quadrants, go to www. gartner.com or call 1.203.964.0096.<-->
As part of the Real World Microsoft Online Services series, we spoke to Christian Kuttler, Director of Information and Communication Technology at Center Parcs, about replacing Google Apps with the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite. Here's what he had to say:
Q: Tell us about the Center Parcs business model.
Kuttler: Center Parcs popularized the concept of a "short break" vacation experience. Each of our resorts provides an all-in-one getaway, combining luxury lodging with unique indoor and outdoor activities—set in the midst of beautiful forest acreage. From their rustic private cottages nestled in the woods, guests can explore nearby hiking trails and lakes, or stroll to first-class spas, restaurants, and shopping venues.
Q: What were the biggest challenges Center Parcs faced with Google Apps?
Kuttler: We welcome 36,000 guests each week to our resorts, so we need to provide employees with effective communication and collaboration tools. We initiated a proof-of-concept deployment of Google Apps to 250 of our employees. We found that a significant number of employees spent considerable time learning the Google Apps interface or compensating for deficiencies in the tools, which meant they had less time to create documents and manage projects.
Google Apps worked well for small teams creating documents that required simple formatting. But when our finance group needed to collaborate on a complex budget document, for example, Google Spreadsheets lacked the sophistication we needed, including all of the formatting shortcuts and analytics capabilities that we were accustomed to in Microsoft Office Excel. With Google Spreadsheets, the more complex the document, the more unstable it became.
Q: Why did you switch from Google Apps to Microsoft Online Services?
Kuttler: Given our direct experience in experimenting with it for more than a year, it was clear that Google Apps is simply not yet ready to be used as an enterprise solution. It lived up to the promise of discounted costs in the beginning, but it didn't deliver on long-term value; in fact, the cost in terms of lost productivity consumed any up-front savings we achieved by moving to Google Apps. After taking a closer look at the hosted solution from Microsoft, we recognized that it offered true value and gave us a stable, reliable platform for growth.
Q: What kinds of benefits have you seen since Center Parcs started using Microsoft Online Services?
Kuttler: When we used Google Apps, I had employees standing in my office saying that they'd given up, that they could not use the applications to complete certain tasks. Now that we've moved to Microsoft Online Services, I don't have that problem anymore. Through our use of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, we've increased employee productivity by a minimum of 20 percent; we've achieved this by giving employees access to high-performance, on-demand tools so that they can work together to meet the needs of our guests.
You can read the full story online and we invite you to join our upcoming TechRepublic Webinar on October 14th to hear from other customer's like Center Parcs who found Microsoft a better fit for their business than Google Apps.
For more success stories like Christian Kuttler's at Center Parcs, read other real-world testimonials on our whymicrosoft website.
If you're reading this post, you're probably interested in the cloud and hopefully in Microsoft Online Services and BPOS in particular. I wanted to take a couple of minutes to highlight some of the great things happening with Microsoft's cloud offerings and also provide you with pointers to some Cloud information resources that I find useful.
First, I want to make sure that you saw the big news this week about the State of Minnesota selecting Microsoft's BPOS cloud offering for their communications and collaboration solution. In a related blog post, Gopal Khanna, Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Minnesota talks in his own words about his thoughts on some of the criteria that Minnesota focused on when making their decision, including security, scalability, and cost.
It's exciting for me to see that Microsoft is delivering on the requirements that customers are looking for as they consider taking advantage of the benefits that cloud offerings deliver. You can also find information on other customers that have adopted our offerings on Microsoft's Customer Evidence site.
Keep your eyes on the following resources to make sure you're aware of all the cool stuff happening in this space.
Here are the resources I follow and some examples of what they have to offer.
Microsoft Online Services Team Blog
Why Microsoft Blog
Microsoft News Center
We live (and work) in exciting times!