Today, in New York, we launched Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010.  With this launch, we have already started rolling out Exchange 2010 - and we are on track to deliver SharePoint 2010 - to our largest online customers this year. From there we will continue rolling out the 2010 technology to our broad base of online customers.  BPOS customers can expect to see a preview of some of these capabilities later this year, including the ability to host the new Office Web Apps on SharePoint Online.

Today, we also announced some major new customers who are joining the more than 40 million people who have Microsoft Online Services today, and I wanted to tell you a little more about those folks and welcome them to the cloud and to the BPOS family.

Kraft Foods is an amazing company with almost a dozen household brands that gross an amazing $1B+ per year, including such favorites as Kraft Mac & Cheese, Oreo and Trident.  Kraft is adopting BPOS to streamline operations and improve communications and collaboration, including in their newly acquired Cadbury unit which had been promoted as a Google Apps customer.

Novartis International is the fourth largest pharmaceutical and life sciences company in the world with over 100,000 employees operating in 140 countries around the world.  Novartis is moving their corporate communications and collaboration from their legacy Lotus Notes environment to BPOS.  Their CIO, Leon Schumacher, was able to join us in New York today, and here's what he had to say about BPOS.

“We chose Microsoft Online Services for our collaboration applications in the cloud for our 100,000 employees around the world.  It will enable our large research and development population to better collaborate to innovate. We can trust Microsoft to provide the enterprise capabilities our company requires to further improve personal productivity and collaboration among our associates so we can focus on our core mission — improving the lives of patients worldwide.” -- Leon V. Schumacher, Group CIO of Novartis

Codelco, based in Chile, is the largest mining company in the world.  As part of the company's efforts to modernize operations and improve communications and collaboration, they are rolling out BPOS to their users, including a variety of deskless workers who previously had no e-mail.

Welcome to the family!

- Paul Englis, Josh Topal