Today we are proud to announce that the University of Arizona has selected Microsoft Online as the messaging and collaboration platform for all faculty and staff.  Earlier in the month I highlighted the fact that 10,000 institutions on every continent have enrolled with our Live@Edu offering in just the last six months.

Research Read and Compliant

The University of Arizona often receives funding and grants for research from the government.  As a result, the IT department needs to provide staff with cutting edge tools that can increase collaboration but do so in a way the remains secure and compliant to industry standards.  "With Microsoft's cloud based service, we found a solution that will essentially bring us into the 21st century for communications tools.  We have a complex environment and our employees demand modern-day technologies and Exchange functionality to be successful at their jobs" said Michele Norin, Chief Information Officer at the University of Arizona. "We also have federal programs we need to comply with, so meeting ITAR and HIPAA rules are critical, and we came away more confident that Microsoft can help keep us complaint."  You can also read up on our new BPOS Federal offering. 

Their criterion for selecting BPOS is similar to the announcementby three universities in the UK who recently chose Microsoft's cloud platform.  Chris Randle, IT Director at UCL summed it up "Microsoft could tell the university exactly where its data would be held and said that it would keep the content of all emails private."

These statements offer a stark contrast from the discussions being had at: University of California, Davis, UMass and Yale University, regarding deep privacy and security concerns related to the use of other solutions, namely Google Apps.  

Wisdom of Crowds through Diversity

So whether you are large research university like UofA or a sports union and pride of a nation or a small law office or a global Pharmaceutical firm, you can take comfort in the wisdom of others who found that only Microsoft Online could meet their unique needs.  We are "All In" and so are our customers.  Sign up for a free trial today. 

If you've never seen the NZ All Blacks Rugby Haka, it's truly one of the great events in any competitive sport. (see video below).  So we are proud this week to announce a win for BPOS with The New Zealand Rugby Union. 

As one of New Zealand’s largest sports organizations they are charged with fostering, developing, administering, promoting, and representing the game of rugby in New Zealand. In their guest blog post they share why the picked Microsoft Online over Google Apps to meet the needs of their organization.   They take IT as serious as they take the game of Rugby so it's great BPOS has been selected to be a partner with the New Zealand Rugby Union.

Just as I highlighted last week, the NZ Rugby also outlines why they've picked Microsoft instead of a competitive alternative.  They discuss the competition's lack of enterprise grade features, hidden costs and extra work for IT to support. 

We look foward to supporting them as a customer and following the All Blacks in the 2001 Rugby World Cup.

Security Concerns. Hidden Costs.  Document Fidelity.  Marketing Hype. No Support. Lack of Roadmap.  Oh My!

(NOTE: this is a duplicate entry from previous week due to blog platform migration at Microsoft)

These are a few of the reasons that the organizations I've spoken to have either left Google Apps or simply put it 'through its paces' and realized it's more pony than horse. 

You can check out our new site of customer testimonials.  In fact, this entire week, I'll be highlighting similar customers and partners stories, even guest blog entries. Phaeton Automotive blogs about why they left Google Apps on the Exchange Blog. TransCorp of Nigeria also blogs why they picked BPOS over Google Apps at the MS Online Blog.  Please also read Chris Capossela's blog on Productivity Applications and the Cloud.  UPDATE: Serena Software announces they are leaving Google Apps.  Read the customer blog.  CapGemini announces their partnership to sell BPOS. NZ Rugby Union announces they have picked BPOS over Google.

Customers Say:  "Google Apps isn't Business Ready."

Google's heritage is in advertising. Google Apps was born from consumer applications designed to serve more advertising. There is nothing wrong with this.  The Consumerization of IT is very real. However, when you start telling customers to use your consumer product as an enterprise solution, you have to at least deliver the basics - provide support, implement meaningful SLAs, understand enterprise customer's real concerns about security and privacy, invest in innovation that matters and deliver a real roadmap.

On the latter, Google Apps strategy continues to vacillate. Last week, they were touting Google Apps as a complement that "works well with Office". In April, they touted Google Apps as "an Office replacement", while simultaneously admitting that the Google Apps architecture 'hit a wall' and needed to be rewritten.  With less than 3 weeks' notice, they pulled offline access for an indefinite period of time and then suffered a widespread outage due to the fact they had deployed 'preview' code into the production environment used by paying customers. As a result, many of Google's customers are hitting walls of a different sort with Google's whimsical and 'see what sticks' approach to the applications their people rely on to get work done.

Rather than just hearing it from me, let's hear from customers who have tried Google and decided to go with Microsoft solutions:

• "Google Apps is not an enterprise-class solution. It's a consumer solution, and we did not want to risk our business on it." - Credit Immobilier de France
• "The Google applications just weren't robust enough to compete with Office Outlook functionality," - James C. Nolan Law Firm
• "The Microsoft online and offline applications complement each other. Google is online only and posed compatibility and formatting issues" Competitiveness .

Customers Say:  "Google Apps can require more work for IT."

Google claims to have 'no dependency on desktop' software, but some customers quickly found that that in order to "Go Google" they needed to deploy software on the desktop!

For example, IT might need to run and maintain additional servers with Google LDAP Server Sync Tool, separate Postini Directory Sync Tool, separate Free Busy Sync Tool for co-existence while also deploying the following to every users machine;  a Gtalk client,  Video Conferencing Add In, an Outlook Sync Tool, Google Gears Add In  and recommended new browsers. 

Again, customers are finding they experience increased support calls, greater end-user training costs, loss in productivity and challenges collaborating with customers and partners:

• "Many of the things you normally expect to be able to do at an enterprise IT management level were not available with Google Apps-things like the ability to easily manage groups and users." Vinci PLC
• "Google has Google Docs and Google Sites, but what's the point of having Google Docs when everyone is working in Office Word...If I threw Google in the mix, I'd have to code all that integration." Kellwood
• "The ability to have an archiving solution that integrates more fully with our e-mail system gives us a level of integration that we never had before when we using the Google Apps platform" - Phaeton Automotive Group

Customers Say: "$50 per user doesn't get you much."

Finally, there's the attractive price.  Even if you ignore all the labor, support and hardware costs mentioned above, other hidden costs quickly emerge.  Take a hypothetical example of a 10 person business that requires email, lightweight document editing, Microsoft Office document synching, digital signatures and workflow.  The first two are clearly included for the $50 price point.  But for the rest of these basic features, the customer must now buy additional software: OffiSync $12/user/yr for Office synchronizing, $358/user/yr for EchoSign's Digitial Signature Package, $40/user/yr for RunMyProcess Workflow. Total cost:  $460/user a year. Not $50. 

In addition, these software add on's have minimal or no integration with Google Apps beyond supporting single sign-on.  So you need to factor in development cost of integrating these solutions and managing multiple vendor contracts.

• "Frankly, the Google value proposition is cost based, and once you take that away, what's left?" - Rexel
• "When we looked at the actual difference in price over a 12-month period, and the amount of grief we'd have gone through with Google, sticking with Microsoft was the clear-cut choice." -SBFI
• "Yes, we might have saved one or two dollars per month going with Google Apps, but it wasn't worth it. Selecting software that makes it more difficult to work is the wrong way to save money." - SaaS IT

 Why Microsoft: 25 years in Productivity

Juxtapose this with Office, SharePoint and Exchange, which appear as "Leaders" in 8 of 10 Gartner Magic quadrants related to Information Work.*  Forrester's recent IT Pro survey found Google was still a distant Office competitor despite Google's best attempts to appeal to IT departments with a message of 'support for':  Outlook, Office files, Active Directory and ActiveSync. 

Customers want certainty, reliability, security, privacy, roadmaps and experience when it comes to a mission critical set of scenarios like Productivity, Messaging and Collaboration.  That's why after 25 years, Microsoft Office remains the best suite of applications for the PC, Phone and Browser and it's why these customers have picked Microsoft as their trusted partner. 

* related Gartner Magic Quadrants - Business Intelligence, Enterprise Content Management, Unified Communications, Horizontal Portals, Information Access Technology (Search), Enterprise Wireless E-mail, Social Software in the Workplace. Challenger: Web Content Management, UC as a Service.

Earlier today Bill Hilf blogged about Microsoft’s Technical Computing initiative and Bob Muglia sent an executive email on the topic. So what is the Technical Computing initiative? I think Bob captured it nicely by positing that recent world events have clearly demonstrated our inability to process vast amounts of information and variables. Two events in particular - the behaviour of global financial markets and the (ongoing) occurrence and impact of a volcano eruption in Iceland. I’ve been personally affected by both with my mortgage going down and almost missing a trip home for a wedding due to the volcano (my own wedding!).

The Technical Computing initiative seeks to bring vast computing power to the scientists and communities who are focused on these problems. It will focus on 3 areas as Bill called out in his blog:

1. Technical computing to the cloud: Microsoft will help lead the way in giving scientists, engineers and analysts the computing power of the cloud.  We’re also working to give existing high-performance computing users the ability to augment their on-premises systems with cloud resources that enable ‘just-in-time’ processing. This platform will help ensure processing resources are available whenever they are needed—reliably, consistently and quickly.  
   
   
2. Simplify parallel development: Today, computers are shipping with more processing power than ever, including multiple cores. But most modern software only uses a small amount of the available processing power. Parallel programs are extremely difficult to write, test, and troubleshoot.  We know that a consistent model for parallel programming can help more developers unlock the tremendous power in today’s computers and enable a new generation of technical computing. We’re focused on delivering new tools to automate and simplify writing software through parallel processing from the desktop… to the cluster… to the cloud.
   
   
3. Develop powerful new technical computing tools and applications: Scientists, engineers and analysts are pushing common tools (i.e., spreadsheets and databases) to the limits with complex, data-intensive models. They need easy access to more computing power using simpler tools to increase the speed of their work, and we’re building a platform with this objective in mind. We expect that these efforts will yield new, easy-to-use tools and applications that automate data acquisition, modeling, simulation, visualization, workflow and collaboration

All 3 are important, big hairy computing issues we’re looking to solve and enable the great minds in computing to solve the really big, global scale challenges (and smaller ones of course) with the power of computing.

A supporting website was also launched today at www.modelingtheworld.com to discuss the trends, challenges and opportunities. There’s some funky new stuff there for Microsoft and in particular I like the social side of it at http://social.modelingtheworld.com/#/home – the team is also on Twitter with the handle @modelingtw

My name is Andrew Kisslo and I am Sr. Product Manager with Microsoft Online. I've recently joined the Cloud Services Expert blog roll and am really excited about the opportunity to share my thoughts and insights about Microsoft's cloud strategy.   I am also honored to share blogging space with Steve Clayton, Jim Glynn and Brett Hill et al. 

As part of the team delivering Online Services (SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, WebApps, etc), I am at the center of "All In" for Microsoft's strategy to deliver cloud based solutions for our commercial customers. You can find my original "All In" blog that I was honored (slightly embarred too!) that Mary Jo Foley called 'coherent and plausible explanation'.  I often write about the competition as a matter of comparative dialogue as I think it's only in comparisons do you find the answers that may be meaningful for your selection criteria.   You can find me blogging on TechNet on the WhyMicrosoft blog as well as on Twitter.  

It's hard to believe but I've been involved with ‘cloud' for almost 15 years.  My first experience out of undergraduate involved working in London at Ziff-Davis supporting ‘banner ads' which were a radical new radical medium for  advertising. How far we've come.   In fact, the office next to me was a small group of folks launching something called ‘Yahoo.co.uk' a year after they were incorporated.     I later joined Pandesic, an SAP/Intel start up that was one the first Application Service Providers (ASP's become SaaS in effect).  We were very early pioneers trying to push the envelope on subscription business models, multitenant architectures and ‘real time' ecommerce. 

I look forward to sharing my thoughts on Microsoft's approach to the cloud.