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Gary Edwards

Future of Cloud Computing Survey Validates Microsoft's Strategy - GuruFocus.com - 0 views

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    "But Microsoft is way ahead of Oracle when it comes to the IaaS segment with Microsoft Azure growing at triple-digit speeds for the last several quarters. Oracle's IaaS segment grew only 6% during the latest quarter, a growth rate that exemplifies its weak position in the strongly growing IaaS market. As Office 365 keeps marching onward and upward, Microsoft is gaining an even stronger foothold in the enterprise segment. Its IaaS offering is as good as any other company out there in the segment, something that is also validated by the strong growth numbers it has been reporting in the last two years. As Microsoft keeps expanding its business management software portfolio that includes CRM and ERP, the company will be in a unique position with strong cloud offerings in SaaS-PaaS-IaaS segments that will be unmatchable by its competition. Companies will naturally gravitate toward a single vendor that can take care of several workflows instead of going through the headache of handling multiple vendors and worrying about integrating all of them to work seamlessly. With Microsoft, that won't be a problem, and that's something Nadella is consciously crafting out of the company's many disparate products. But don't get me wrong. The need for multiple SaaS vendors will always be there. Different businesses have different needs, and there will be times when only a niche player would be able to adequately address those needs. But when you have a company that can take care of the majority of the workflows as well as workloads, like Microsoft can, you'd rather keep Microsoft to handle all the heavy lifting while throwing in a few more SaaS companies to address the entirety of your technology needs. There won't be a need to have Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) manage your customer relationships, Oracle handle your enterprise resource planning, Microsoft handle your office productivity suite and Amazon handle your infrastructure. All you need is a few clicks on your Microsoft
Gary Edwards

Why Microsoft is building HoloLens - Business Insider - 0 views

  • Jumpstarting the future The iPhone and Android have a stranglehold on the mobile market. Apple has ridden the iPhone to becoming the most valuable company in the world, while Google's Android is now the most powerful operating system in the world. Microsoft missed that boat. And Microsoft, going forward, has to decide if it wants to keep throwing good money after bad into its struggling Windows phone business while it tries to force the next big thing to happen. 
  • Microsoft has decided to build the devices it wants to see in the world. And with PC sales shrinking, Microsoft is looking to more science-fictional concepts. The tone was set in 2012, when Microsoft launched the Surface, its first tablet. That was followed up by the Surface Pro laptop/tablet hybrid, and eventually, the Surface Book, Microsoft's first full-fledged laptop.  
  • And in all cases, those cloned devices are running the Microsoft Windows 10 operating system.
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  • Building a computer (or a hologram headset, or a car) is labor-intensive, requires a lot of specialized parts, and takes time to make each and every unit. Dell's margins hover around 3%; Ford's are around 7%.  Meanwhile, one of Microsoft's big advantages has always been that software is a much higher-margin business than hardware. In 1999, right at the height of its powers, Microsoft's operating margins were 51.7%.
  • Microsoft's smart move was to make profitable software, and let companies like IBM, Dell, HP, and Compaq build their low-margin, "IBM Compatible" PCs. After all, they all still needed buckets of pricey Windows licenses, no matter what they charged for their computers.
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    The key to the Microsoft Empire has always been that of controlling the "interoperability layer". It's something Bill Gates learned in 1980, when he opted to forgo royalty payments from IBM for DOS, in order to control all rights to DOS. "Probably the smartest choice Bill Gates ever made came in 1980, when he decided not to hand over the copyright for Microsoft's first-ever operating system to IBM.  In 1980, IBM contracted a startup called Microsoft to deliver DOS, an operating system for its forthcoming IBM PC, on a tight deadline. The IBM PC came out in 1981, and soon became a smash hit, surpassing the leading Apple II. A horde of competitors rushed to build their own "IBM Compatible" clones that could run all of the same software and use all of the same hardware upgrades. But to build those IBM clones, they needed DOS. And if they wanted DOS, they needed to fork over cash to Microsoft. Microsoft kept the rights in lieu of royalties from IBM. DOS put Microsoft the very center of the PC revolution, even through the era of Windows, and even after IBM left the PC market, eventually selling off that business. 36 years later, it's been a long time since the IBM PC moment. And with the Apple iPhone and Google Android ruling the all-important mobile market, Microsoft missed its shot at the mobile operating system revolution.  That's why Microsoft, which keeps boasting about how much it loves selling cloud services and subscriptions, is suddenly investing so much in hardware like the HoloLens and the Surface. If no new IBM PC will come along like in 1981, Microsoft will just have to build it itself. "
Gary Edwards

The Office 365 Story: Is Microsoft leading the way for Cloud Office Applications? - 0 views

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    "Shortly after the start of the millennium, Microsoft stated a goal to be the go-to enterprise platform for the data center. Many in the industry scoffed at the idea that Microsoft could dominate in a market traditionally led by Unix. Today, there are few enterprises that don't have a significant investment in Microsoft servers and infrastructure. Five years ago Microsoft launched Office 365 and, right now, we're seeing a parallel in their move to lead the cloud office application sector. Office and the enterprise applications that support Office 365-Exchange, SharePoint and Skype for Business - have become ubiquitous in the market. In July this year, it was reported that Office 365 is used daily by over 70 million enterprise users. However, Microsoft hasn't achieved this success without challenges. In 2013, many industry pundits saw Google Apps for Enterprise as the heir apparent for cloud and productivity, but things have changed significantly in the last three years. Under Satya Nadella's leadership, Microsoft has rebranded to support its 'mobile-first, cloud- first' go-to-market. The move to support Office on the Apple and Google platforms has strengthened its position in the market. Following this success, their next ambition is to enable customers and partners to move to Office 365. Earlier this year, Microsoft launched a number of initiatives to help clients consume Office 365 licenses more effectively. One such program is geared towards securing the license base by motivating renewals and preventing-churn versus a completely new sale. Once a client activates and consumes the licenses on Office 365, they receive ongoing upgrades, renewals, and new features as part of an evergreen service. Employees experience the latest across all their devices. This compares favorably to the historical process of waiting every three to four years for the on-premises Enterprise Agreement to be signed and subsequent refresh of a laptop with a new office applica
Gary Edwards

Microsoft's Path Is Leading to a Connected World -- Redmondmag.com - 0 views

  • The Xamarin story isn't about building flashy consumer games or apps to sell for 99 cents; rather, it's a route to building line-of-business apps that tie into enterprise databases (on-premises or in the cloud) and then deploying those apps to a fleet of business users who don't have to be tied down to a single platform. Your new enterprise search app can run on an iPhone, an iPad Pro, any current Android device, or a Windows Phone or tablet.
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    "Back in Microsoft's early days, Bill Gates and Paul Allen devised the mission statement that became the formula for their company's success: "A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software." Fast-forward a few decades and the playing field has changed. For starters, the notion that we can get by with just one computer at home and one at the office is downright quaint in 2016. Then there's that word software, which brings up images of shrink-wrapped retail packages and CD jewel boxes. Today, most modern development is aimed at creating apps that are lightweight and easily available for modern mobile platforms. And even traditional software is morphing into services, managed in the cloud and available from just about anywhere with Internet access. Microsoft Azure services are gradually replacing on-premises servers, and Office 365 subscriptions are eating into the market for perpetual Office licenses. Put it all together, and I suggest it's time for Satya Nadella's Microsoft to adopt a new mission statement: "A connected world, filled with intelligent devices running Microsoft services and apps." The company's latest financial results suggest that Microsoft is living up to that mission statement. The Intelligent Cloud segment, which combines traditional server products and cloud services like Microsoft Azure, is top dog in Redmond. In the first half of fiscal 2016, Microsoft's combined commercial cloud businesses grew 70 percent compared to the previous year, and that growth rate shows no signs of stopping. To get to that point, Microsoft had to get rid of the mindset that Windows was its most important product. And, indeed, that's happening already. Aaron Levie, CEO of Box and a Silicon Valley veteran, told me recently that he thinks Microsoft has mastered the art of "openness." The result is a series of moves that would have been unthinkable even five years ago, with a steady stream of apps for iOS and Android, including Office 365 rele
Gary Edwards

MSFT Stock: Here's Why the Bears Are Wrong on Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) - 0 views

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    "One standout in the cloud business is the company's "Office 365" product suite. Nadella took the old Office suite, which charged users every couple of years for a licence, and moved it to the cloud, where users now pay a monthly fee instead. Microsoft hasn't given a revenue breakdown for Office 365, but in the latest quarter, Microsoft said that revenue grew 63% on a constant currency basis over the same time last year. It also now has 22.2 million subscribers, up from 20.6 million subscribers in the previous quarter. Bernstein analyst Mark Moerdler forecasts that the cloud version of Office 365 had annual sales trending to $6.5 billion in the most recent quarter. (Source: "Microsoft Office Shines in the Cloud, Azure Will Be Profitable, Says Bernstein," Barron's, April 8, 2016.) That's out of total commercial cloud revenue that Microsoft reported of $10.0 billion in annualized sales. (Source: Microsoft Corporation, op cit.) So Office 365 is growing like crazy, but that's not the only bright spot in Microsoft's cloud business. In the battle for cloud computing services, "Microsoft Azure" is second to Amazon.com, Inc.'s (NASDAQ:AMZN) "Amazon Web Services" (AWS). However, Microsoft is starting to gain. While Azure has about 10% of the market to AWS's 30%, Azure is becoming bigger and bigger and it's bound to erode Amazon's lead. In the latest quarter, Azure grew 120% on a constant currency basis, which is almost double AWS's growth. (Source: "How Microsoft's Azure Is Giving Stiff Competition to Amazon's AWS," Yahoo! Finance, April 8, 2016.) Again, Microsoft didn't break down revenue for Azure but according to Bernstein's Moerdler, Azure's annual sales run rate is about $1.8 billion. (Source: Barron's, op cit.)"
Gary Edwards

Microsoft: A 'Significant Disruptor of Collaboration' - Post - No Jitter - 0 views

  • In a release on the findings, Synergy attributes Microsoft's overall gain in the collaboration market to the widening of its lead in the hosted/cloud segment, as well as to its continued strong premises positioning. Calling Microsoft a "significant disruptor in collaboration," Jeremy Duke, Synergy founder and chief analyst, said the company's "aggressive embrace of all things cloud is opening up ground for further disruption and market share advances." Is Microsoft's cloud gambit lifting all boats? Synergy's 1Q data shows that, for the first time ever, total quarterly revenues from hosted/cloud solutions are higher than those for premises deployments. Hosted/cloud revenues are up 10% year on year, compared to a 2% loss in premises revenue. Among hosted/cloud options, Synergy's research showed that contact center, voice and UC as a service, video, and enterprise presence/IM enjoyed "particularly strong growth" in the opening quarter of 2015. At 51%, hosted/cloud solutions now account for slightly more than half of the total collaboration market, the firm reported. Microsoft stands to gain as enterprises become more amenable to getting communications and collaboration from the cloud. "We believe that if Microsoft is successful in rolling out Skype for Business in Office 365, it could take its collaboration opportunity to a whole new level," continued Duke, in his press release statement.
  • His thinking is similar to that of frequent No Jitter contributor and Enterprise Connect speaker, Brian Riggs, an analyst with Ovum. In an April post, Riggs said he considers Microsoft's Skype for Business Online to be a game changer for everybody -- customers included -- in the Microsoft ecosystem. With a commitment to adding PSTN connectivity and Enterprise Voice in Skype for Business Online, Microsoft has finally taken the first step toward delivery of a full-featured hosted UC service, as he explained. (Certainly Microsoft's hosted/cloud story will be a topic of interest at the Enterprise Connect Tour on implementing Lync/Skype for Business we have planned for the fall. Get more information Enterprise Connect Tour here. Join us in a city near you.) But, of course, nobody expects Cisco to sit still as Microsoft nibbles away at its toes -- and it isn't. "... such threats are not going unnoticed and we see Cisco continue to refresh and reinvent its collaboration strategy," noted Duke, pointing to the recent Tropo acquisition and Spark rollout as examples. Dismissing Cisco certainly would be foolish -- it showed strong quarterly growth, at 6% year on year to a 14% overall stake of worldwide revenues, for its premises business, and as Duke suggested, its collaboration initiatives are really starting to heat up now. I know many industry watchers, myself included, are eager to see where Cisco heads now that it has a passel of communications-savvy developers under its purview, for example.
  • Of course, Cisco and Microsoft aren't the only companies in the market. Avaya and Google hold the third seats in the premises and hosted/cloud segments, respectively, while IBM, Polycom, Verizon, Citrix, AT&T and Mitel also hold leadership positions, Synergy said. Overall revenues for collaboration products, "were once again well over $8 billion in the quarter."
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    "Latest Synergy Research data shows Microsoft lapping at Cisco's heels in the overall collaboration market, and well ahead in the hosted/cloud segment. A couple of primary tussles characterize the collaboration decision today: Cisco vs. Microsoft, and cloud vs. premises. So it behooves us to ask, then: What impact might we expect Microsoft's big push into the cloud, a la Skype for Business and Office 365, to have on each of these critical enterprise decision points? Will Microsoft push ahead of Cisco as it makes cloud the center of its collaboration universe? And will its Skype for Business/Office 365/voice story make the cloud an easier choice for enterprise communications professionals trying to determine whether to ditch a premises installation? This is certainly one way to think about the latest collaboration market data from Synergy Research Group, released this week for first-quarter 2015. The Synergy research shows Microsoft trailing Cisco ever so slightly in the total collaboration market, but well ahead of its chief competitor in hosted/cloud collaboration, as displayed in the graphic below. "
Gary Edwards

Windows Mobile autopsy holds warning for Windows 10 Mobile - MSPoweruser - 0 views

  • While it seemed the game was Microsoft’s to lose, the rise of RIM’s Blackberry caught Microsoft off-guard. Microsoft became confused by competing demands to challenge Blackberry on one end, Palm on the other and Symbian on the 3rd, and Microsoft’s traditional OEM partners were not playing ball, forcing Microsoft to partner with then ODM HTC.
  • Hernandez boils the issues to 4 points, the biggest being constant changes of direction:
  • Enterprise, consumer, enterprise, consumer: The single biggest driver to the failure of Windows Mobile to take off, was its key asset: Microsoft.
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  • Consumers drove the purchase decision: The Windows logo sold PCs. Ergo the windows logo (and all the familiarity that it implied) must also be able to sell phones… but it turns out that consumers didn’t yet care what OS the phone was running
  • As the iPhone and Android devices would prove soon-enough, consumers were willing to accept two handed input if it provided for richer features and bigger screens. Microsoft, given RIM-compete as an edict, focused on keyboards over touchscreen.
  • The “web” was not the “web”: The final nails in the WinMo coffin came in 2007 and 2008 when Apple launched the iPhone and Google launched Android. And it was not about the design of the iPhone or the amazing hinge Andy Rubin built for the Android G1, but more philosophically about what type of web consumers wanted on their mobile device.
  • Microsoft, RIM and Nokia had all built ways to compress and reformat the web into smaller screens. These phone and OS makers seemed to believe they had the right to determine what the web should look like on a mobile device. Android’s vision had always been to have a full rich-HTML web experience on a mobile device (very googley) and both the iPhone and Android platforms launched with webkit browsers and full HTML support. And consumers voted with their thumbs…They wanted the “web” to be the web.
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    "Today's Windows Mobile is Microsoft second try at an OS with that name. Despite having an early first mover advantage with Windows Mobile in the early 2000's Microsoft's lead folded like a bad hand of cards when the iPhone and Android arrived on the scene in the second half of the decade. We have not heard much about the reasons for this failure from inside the company, until a few weeks ago, when Christian Hernandez, who worked as a developer in the division, spoke out about his experience of this period in a Medium post. He revealed that Microsoft did anticipate the upcoming evolution of mobile phones into internet-connected computing devices and that initially things were looking good, due to Microsoft having the following advantages: A solid and stable embedded OS code base with WinCE and a growing PDA platform in PocketPC which integrated familiar apps and user experience to the desktop A relationship with chip manufacturers and OEMs which should allow it to copy the model of the Wintel era onto smartphones where Microsoft provided the OS, reference designs and marketing dollars and OEMs built the hardware and took it to market A well managed and broad set of application developers who lived and died by Microsoft and would surely support its new shift towards a mobile platform. This also included Microsoft's own apps like Outlook, Word, Excel, MSN Messenger, Internet Explorer and XBox assets. A lot of money in the bank to buy customers and market share"
Gary Edwards

How Slack Versus Microsoft Could Play Out - 0 views

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    "Either way, customers win. In early November Microsoft announced a new product called Microsoft Teams. It's a way for groups of people, typically colleagues inside a company, to communicate with each other over multiple, simultaneous conversations. It will be part of the software giant's online Office 365 product, the "productivity" subscription program used by 85 million "knowledge workers" around the world. More than a billion additional customers use the offline version of Office. A relatively small group of people-4 million, to be precise-will recognize something familiar about the new Microsoft offering. That's because it's more or less what a San Francisco startup called Slack does. Microsoft is adding a few bells and whistles, including easier-to-follow threaded conversations and video conferencing. Slack, which took the charmingly old-fashioned step of buying a newspaper ad to "welcome" Microsoft to its game, has said it will match those features. (Fortune, like many journalism organizations, uses Slack; after a year of steadily increasing usage, I've grown to like it.) This isn't the first time Microsoft has unveiled a "Slack killer." In fact, it is becoming something of an annual event. What's more, Slack is growing fast. It has 4 million users, up from 1.25 million a year ago. About 30% of those customers pay either $6.67 or $12.50 per month for the product, depending on which features they use. My back-of-the-envelope calculation of Slack's annual revenue, assuming all customers pay the average of the two price points, is around $140 million. "You're pretty close," Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield told me just before Thanksgiving. "
Paul Merrell

Microsoft Pitches Technology That Can Read Facial Expressions at Political Rallies - 0 views

  • On the 21st floor of a high-rise hotel in Cleveland, in a room full of political operatives, Microsoft’s Research Division was advertising a technology that could read each facial expression in a massive crowd, analyze the emotions, and report back in real time. “You could use this at a Trump rally,” a sales representative told me. At both the Republican and Democratic conventions, Microsoft sponsored event spaces for the news outlet Politico. Politico, in turn, hosted a series of Microsoft-sponsored discussions about the use of data technology in political campaigns. And throughout Politico’s spaces in both Philadelphia and Cleveland, Microsoft advertised an array of products from “Microsoft Cognitive Services,” its artificial intelligence and cloud computing division. At one exhibit, titled “Realtime Crowd Insights,” a small camera scanned the room, while a monitor displayed the captured image. Every five seconds, a new image would appear with data annotated for each face — an assigned serial number, gender, estimated age, and any emotions detected in the facial expression. When I approached, the machine labeled me “b2ff” and correctly identified me as a 23-year-old male.
  • “Realtime Crowd Insights” is an Application Programming Interface (API), or a software tool that connects web applications to Microsoft’s cloud computing services. Through Microsoft’s emotional analysis API — a component of Realtime Crowd Insights — applications send an image to Microsoft’s servers. Microsoft’s servers then analyze the faces and return emotional profiles for each one. In a November blog post, Microsoft said that the emotional analysis could detect “anger, contempt, fear, disgust, happiness, neutral, sadness or surprise.” Microsoft’s sales representatives told me that political campaigns could use the technology to measure the emotional impact of different talking points — and political scientists could use it to study crowd response at rallies.
  • Facial recognition technology — the identification of faces by name — is already widely used in secret by law enforcement, sports stadiums, retail stores, and even churches, despite being of questionable legality. As early as 2002, facial recognition technology was used at the Super Bowl to cross-reference the 100,000 attendees to a database of the faces of known criminals. The technology is controversial enough that in 2013, Google tried to ban the use of facial recognition apps in its Google glass system. But “Realtime Crowd Insights” is not true facial recognition — it could not identify me by name, only as “b2ff.” It did, however, store enough data on each face that it could continuously identify it with the same serial number, even hours later. The display demonstrated that capability by distinguishing between the number of total faces it had seen, and the number of unique serial numbers. Photo: Alex Emmons
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  • Instead, “Realtime Crowd Insights” is an example of facial characterization technology — where computers analyze faces without necessarily identifying them. Facial characterization has many positive applications — it has been tested in the classroom, as a tool for spotting struggling students, and Microsoft has boasted that the tool will even help blind people read the faces around them. But facial characterization can also be used to assemble and store large profiles of information on individuals, even anonymously.
  • Alvaro Bedoya, a professor at Georgetown Law School and expert on privacy and facial recognition, has hailed that code of conduct as evidence that Microsoft is trying to do the right thing. But he pointed out that it leaves a number of questions unanswered — as illustrated in Cleveland and Philadelphia. “It’s interesting that the app being shown at the convention ‘remembered’ the faces of the people who walked by. That would seem to suggest that their faces were being stored and processed without the consent that Microsoft’s policy requires,” Bedoya said. “You have to wonder: What happened to the face templates of the people who walked by that booth? Were they deleted? Or are they still in the system?” Microsoft officials declined to comment on exactly what information is collected on each face and what data is retained or stored, instead referring me to their privacy policy, which does not address the question. Bedoya also pointed out that Microsoft’s marketing did not seem to match the consent policy. “It’s difficult to envision how companies will obtain consent from people in large crowds or rallies.”
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    But nobody is saying that the output of this technology can't be combined with the output of facial recognition technology to let them monitor you individually AND track your emotions. Fortunately, others are fighting back with knowledge and tech to block facial recognition. http://goo.gl/JMQM2W
Gary Edwards

Pssst! Office 365 customers pay Microsoft up to 80% more over long haul | Computerworld - 0 views

  • Transactional customers buy Office once every five to seven years, said Hood. But by convincing businesses to subscribe to Office 365, specifically the E3 plan, Microsoft can realize an 80% increase in revenue over the years-long relationship. Office 365 E3 includes the core Office application suite, as well as cloud-based Exchange, SharePoint and Skype for Business, shifting those services from on-premises systems to Microsoft's servers.
  • One expert scoffed at Microsoft's multiplier, which he said was actually a low-ball estimate. "A 1.8x multiplier? How about a 6x or 20x multiplier?" said Paul DeGroot, principal at Pica Communications, a consulting firm that specializes in deciphering Microsoft's licensing practices.
  • DeGroot's point was that Microsoft rakes in much, much more than just an additional 20%, 40% or 80% by pulling customers to the cloud. "I think those numbers are conservative," DeGroot said in an email. "
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  • I always remind customers that Microsoft's internal rationale for the cloud is not superior technology or a better fit for customers, but that they can switch customers from purely transactional strategies -- where they wait for Microsoft to produce value before buying in -- or from standard EAs, where customers can stop purchasing SA but keep using the product -- to a subscription model where the customer owns nothing and must continually pay Microsoft."
  • DeGroot, like many licensing gurus, is often called in when a Microsoft customer grows weary of paying Redmond and wants ideas on cutting costs."We routinely reduce customers' payments to Microsoft by 40%, and the two most recent engagements were 75% lower," asserted DeGroot. The latter, he said, was accomplished by dropping the SA annuity when the customer had no plans to upgrade in the next three years, the length of SA contracts.
  • "Customers can drop SA but keep using the latest products in the full Microsoft stack for the next three years with very little downside," DeGroot added. "That's devastating for Microsoft's revenue stream. But if Microsoft can get them into [Office 365] E3, that can't happen. Microsoft will determine what features are available, when they upgrade to new versions, and how much they pay."
  • In her presentation to Wall Street, Hood also talked about even greater revenue opportunities based on selling more cloud-based services to Office 365 customers.
  • "There is additional 'yield opportunity,' in our language, to add lifetime value here, in addition to adding users," she said. For Hood, "yield" means, in her words, "selling more things on top of an installed unit."
  • the lifetime value of a customer. "When we get a cloud customer completely deployed and get utilization and consumption, it opens up with the first service, it opens up the ability for me to get the other services in there,"
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    "Microsoft loves subscriptions. Moving a corporate customer from "transactional" purchases of Office -- the once-traditional practice of purchasing one-time, perpetual licenses that let workers use the suite as long as their firms want -- to Office 365 rent-not-buy subscriptions results in almost a doubling of revenue for Microsoft. "Over the lifetime, the increased reach, the increased frequency in this example, as well as some yield, adding some incremental services, results in a 1.8 times lifetime value of that user in the transition," said CFO Amy Hood in a meeting with Wall Street last week."
Gary Edwards

Philipp Karcher's blog | Forrester Blogs - 0 views

  • Today Microsoft starts shipping Office for iPad, finally plugging the gap in its portfolio that’s been filled by popular document viewers and editors like QuickOffice and SlideShark.   Does this come too late for Microsoft? As much as naysayers like to proclaim Office is dying, people still overwhelmingly use it at home and at work. Office is supported at virtually every organization. Our survey of Forrester clients at the end of last year showed strong strides by Google Docs with 13% of firms using it.* However, the caveat is companies that have gone Google are using Docs to complement Office with collaboration features and mobile support, not to replace it.   You could argue how much incremental revenue Microsoft lost out on, but I don’t think the lack of native Office apps has caused Microsoft to cede ground to other office productivity suites on the PC, where the vast majority of content is still created. Keep in mind that out of the 20% of information workers in North America and Europe that use a tablet for work, 60% of them use some office productivity software on it.** Half of tablets used for work are iPads. So immediately just 6% of information workers will be considering the Office apps as an alternative to what they are using on their tablets today.    Is Microsoft really multi-platform now?
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    "Today Microsoft starts shipping Office for iPad, finally plugging the gap in its portfolio that's been filled by popular document viewers and editors like QuickOffice and SlideShark.   Does this come too late for Microsoft? As much as naysayers like to proclaim Office is dying, people still overwhelmingly use it at home and at work. Office is supported at virtually every organization. Our survey of Forrester clients at the end of last year showed strong strides by Google Docs with 13% of firms using it.* However, the caveat is companies that have gone Google are using Docs to complement Office with collaboration features and mobile support, not to replace it.   You could argue how much incremental revenue Microsoft lost out on, but I don't think the lack of native Office apps has caused Microsoft to cede ground to other office productivity suites on the PC, where the vast majority of content is still created. Keep in mind that out of the 20% of information workers in North America and Europe that use a tablet for work, 60% of them use some office productivity software on it.** Half of tablets used for work are iPads. So immediately just 6% of information workers will be considering the Office apps as an alternative to what they are using on their tablets today.    Is Microsoft really multi-platform now?"
Gary Edwards

MS Office 365 and its Influence on Business - 0 views

  • “MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats”
  • Office 365: what is going on at the market? Offline version of MS Office has actually not many competitors with the comparable functionality. LibreOffice, OpenOffice, CorelOffice etc. may be referred among them. But if you examine the cross-platform solutions for the offline document editing, MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats.
  • Costs of the full-fledged package MS Office 365 (including its cloud-based capacities) and the offline version of MS Office 2013/2016 for the home users are comparable. Therefore the progressive transition of the majority of users to MS Office 365 may be forecasted.
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  • Currently the primary market spreading the MS Office 365 services is the corporate sector. However soon, due to the flexible pricing policy of Microsoft, new home users will progressively give their preference to MS Office 365. Rise of popularity of the off-the-shelf Microsoft solutions in the corporate sector, especially in the midst of the small and mid-sized business, is also expected. Integration of MS Office 365 with SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Skype, OneDrive, PowerBIand Lync Online allows the full-scaled employment of the MS stack for document management and solution of other company tasks (video conferences, corporate mail, team-work with documents, data monitoring and analyze etc.).
  • There are three essential reasons why Office 365 will be highly demanded by business: - Business currently needs services for collaborative editing of the huge documents as well as for arrangement and management of their ample quantities; provision of the required safety level in the document workflow systems without additional expenses. Set of the Microsoft services and its integration with MS Office 365 offer solution for these tasks with some minor reservations. -Integration of MS Office 365 with existing services and employment of the off-the-shelf Microsoft solutions for organization of the document workflow are also the promising trends. -Good results can be expected from employment of the cloud-based Azure platform for extension of the MS Office 365 capacities and building process setup and document workflow systems in the small and mid-sized business environment.
  • But if you examine the cross-platform solutions for the offline document editing, MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats.
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    "Microsoft Office 365: what is important for business to know about the "cloud-based" office? Cloud-based service Microsoft Office 365 has become more and more popular solution for managing document workflow in companies. Subsequently, the number of MS Office 365 subscribers is growing by tens percent every year. For instance in the third quarter of 2015 the cloud-based services Office 365, Azure and Dynamics CRM became the principal drivers of the profit markup of Microsoft. Office 365: what is going on at the market? Offline version of MS Office has actually not many competitors with the comparable functionality. LibreOffice, OpenOffice, CorelOffice etc. may be referred among them. But if you examine the cross-platform solutions for the offline document editing, MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats. Costs of the full-fledged package MS Office 365 (including its cloud-based capacities) and the offline version of MS Office 2013/2016 for the home users are comparable. Therefore the progressive transition of the majority of users to MS Office 365 may be forecasted. Currently the primary market spreading the MS Office 365 services is the corporate sector. However soon, due to the flexible pricing policy of Microsoft, new home users will progressively give their preference to MS Office 365. Rise of popularity of the off-the-shelf Microsoft solutions in the corporate sector, especially in the midst of the small and mid-sized business, is also expected. Integration of MS Office 365 with SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Skype, OneDrive, PowerBIand Lync Online allows the full-scaled employment of the MS stack for document management and solution of other company tasks (video conferences, corporate mail, team-work with documents, data monitoring and analyze etc.). "MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats" "
Gary Edwards

Microsoft limits unlimited OneDrive for Business storage to priciest Office 365 enterpr... - 0 views

  • Microsoft yesterday announced that only the priciest enterprise Office 365 subscription plans will be eligible for an unlimited OneDrive for Business storage allotment.
  • "We ... recognize we are disappointing customers who expected unlimited storage across every Office 365 plan, and I want to apologize for not meeting your expectations," said Jeff Teper, Microsoft's top OneDrive executive, in a post to a company blog yesterday.
  • Previously, Microsoft had said that all Office 365 customers would have a never-ending supply of storage in OneDrive for Business, the service for commercial customers. As of Thursday, the firm's roadmap for the subscription service still states, "Moving forward, all Office 365 customers will get unlimited OneDrive storage at no additional cost [emphasis added."
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  • Microsoft significantly revised that on Wednesday. Only the most expensive Office 365 plans -- Enterprise E3, the to-be-retired Enterprise E4, and the new Enterprise E5 plans -- will offer unlimited storage if more than five users are on the plan. And then only in stages, with each increase requiring Microsoft's approval.
  • Office 365 Enterprise E3 lists at $20 per user per month (or $240 annually), while E5 -- which replaces E4, with the latter set to fall off the catalog by June 2016 -- runs $35 per user per month ($420 annually). Less expensive plans, including the $12.50 per user per month ($150 annually) Business Premium, will have a 1TB cap on OneDrive for Business.
  • Naturally, Microsoft would love if Business Essentials users upgraded to E3 to get, among other things, more OneDrive space, as the company would see a 60% revenue jump from those customers.
  • Microsoft has made other moves recently to boost revenue from Office, including a 59% price increase in the top-tier enterprise-grade plan.
  • Microsoft hasn't gotten around to changing the Office 365 roadmap, which continues to promise unlimited OneDrive and OneDrive for Business storage space.
  •  
    " "We ... recognize we are disappointing customers who expected unlimited storage across every Office 365 plan, and I want to apologize for not meeting your expectations," said Jeff Teper, Microsoft's top OneDrive executive, in a post to a company blog yesterday. Previously, Microsoft had said that all Office 365 customers would have a never-ending supply of storage in OneDrive for Business, the service for commercial customers. As of Thursday, the firm's roadmap for the subscription service still states, "Moving forward, all Office 365 customers will get unlimited OneDrive storage at no additional cost [emphasis added." Microsoft significantly revised that on Wednesday. Only the most expensive Office 365 plans -- Enterprise E3, the to-be-retired Enterprise E4, and the new Enterprise E5 plans -- will offer unlimited storage if more than five users are on the plan. And then only in stages, with each increase requiring Microsoft's approval. Between now and March, Microsoft will increase the storage allowance for customers on those plans -- as well as the corresponding ones for government customers and education -- from the current 1TB to 5TB. After that, companies and organizations that want more will have to ask for it."
Gary Edwards

ConnectWise CEO: Partners seeing Microsoft Office cloud push as 'crushing' - from Chann... - 0 views

  •  
    "Microsoft's push to get customers to run their applications on the cloud is challenging channel partners who are comfortable selling the way they currently sell, according to Arnie Bellini, CEO of Connectwise. He says although partners may be reluctant to see their managed services lifestyle changed, it's time all Microsoft and Connectwise partners start considering a cloud services practice. Bellini pointed out that many ConnectWise and Microsoft solution providers are "reluctant" to embrace building a cloud services practice because "life is good" in managed services and predictable recurring revenue. But with the way Microsoft prices on-premise versus cloud Office offerings, no reasonable business person will opt for on-premise anymore, creating challenges for channel partners, Bellini told Channelnomics. "When it's under [a customer's] roof, MSPs are very comfortable because they know they can manage and monitor it and they become very sticky with their client as a result," he said. "But once that infrastructure moves from under the roof to the Microsoft cloud, they feel they will lose control. They feel they will not be able to bill for those services, and that's what Microsoft is asking them to do. They saying you've got to...resell Office 365 and bill your clients for it. The logistics of all of that are crushing to Microsoft partners.""
Gary Edwards

It's Time for Microsoft to Reboot Office - WSJ - 0 views

  • But if you’re in my dad’s camp, you don’t need to keep buying new versions of Office. Microsoft hasn’t added a ton of new innovations to typesetting and presentation building—those all work just fine on what you’ve already got. My dad was using Office 2008 for Mac, so I asked him to install 2016. His verdict: It’s not terrible, but he sees no reason to change. (There are also a number of free or cheap basic productivity programs, including Apple’s iWork suite and LibreOffice, that, like Google, can still open and save in compatible Office formats.)
  • There’s a generational divide at work here: A survey last summer by the tech firm BetterCloud found that companies whose employee base averaged between 18 and 34 were 55% more likely to use Google than Office; those who average 35 to 54 were 19% more likely to use Office.
  • But Office 2016 doesn’t give enough reasons for previous Office owners to upgrade. And people looking for rich collaboration don’t need to wait for Microsoft to catch up.
  •  
    "I've purchased the latest Microsoft Office for every computer I've owned. It was a foregone conclusion. Dating back to when Word was white type on a blue screen, I used it so often I could recite the shortcuts. (Thesaurus? Shift-F7.) But Microsoft has run out of reasons to keep me paying. How we get work done on computers has fundamentally changed. For the new Office 2016, Microsoft wants you to pay $150 for collaborative capabilities that others already do better, free. It brings little new to people who rely on deep features in Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Its mediocrity led me to a larger conclusion: It's time for Microsoft to press Control-Alt-Delete on the whole concept of Office. My relationship with Office started to sour as smartphones carried my work everywhere while my Office files stayed in the cubicle. I began emailing myself instead of fretting about scattered .doc files. Google ran with the work-anywhere idea early. Its free Web-based word processor and spreadsheet allow people in different locations to edit a document together. With Google Docs and Sheets, there's no more emailing drafts back and forth."
Gary Edwards

It's Time for Microsoft to Reboot Office - WSJ - 0 views

  • The target customer for much of Office’s evolution is corporate. But there are 15 million people who pay $70 or more a year for Office updates—and countless more who, like me, have bought Office for a home computer.
  • There’s a generational divide at work here: A survey last summer by the tech firm BetterCloud found that companies whose employee base averaged between 18 and 34 were 55% more likely to use Google than Office; those who average 35 to 54 were 19% more likely to use Office.
  • I'm a transactional lawyer, been using Word since 2002, and I think it's a terrible word processing program.  But we're stuck in it - there's no way out.MS has never fixed the two core horrible problems in Word - Styles and Section Breaks.  They should be removed from the program completely - there is no way to "fix" them.Before you say that they can be learned -- and I have indeed learned them -- here's the reality:  No one but me -- and I mean not one single lawyer or secretary I have ever worked or emailed with -- works correctly with Styles or Section Breaks.  Our long documents are emailed to the lawyers for the other parties, they make changes in their own, different Styles with additional manual formatting, and the documents become a mess.  Since we save and re-use our documents, I have to spend a lot of time cleaning them up, only to see them messed up again by the end of each deal.  And Styles can break by themselves.Word is junk.  Still inferior to 1996 WordPerfect.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Thom - We still have WordPerfect on our office PCs.  We stopped using it because all our clients have only Word.  And no one has WordPerfect.  So what good does it do to make a document in WordPerfect when no one else can open it or revise it.We're stuck with Word, and it is awful awful awful. It was a shock how bad Word was when we switched from WordPerfect in 2002, and Word gets worse with each iteration.And it's not just Styles and Section Breaks; it's so many other things.I could do and edit macros in WordPerfect.  Not Word.Automatic numbering in Word is a failure, and Word does not play nice when we buy "add-ons" to try to fix that.Word does NOT incorporate an Excel spreadsheet easily, and Word's tables are below primitive.Word cannot even capitalize correctly in "Title Case", but WordPerfect could in 1996.
  • What Microsoft needs to do is fix some of the issues it's had for years - creating robust numbered/billeted lists that don't mysteriously change format - word styles that just work instead of changing anytime a word in that style is bolded. I spend more time fixing templates than I do using them in some instances. Word should look at Adobe FrameMaker for some methods on how they could simplify the application while making it more robust.
  • Fowler is correct that workplaces are the bread and butter of Office. Many home users who aren't students really don't need a complete office suite. But they never did - that's nothing new.
  • @Kevin Morgan, the problem is that everyone uses Office and Word.  They are compatible with offices across the world.
  • @Timothy D. Naegele @Kevin Morgan I think that the problem is that users (neither companies nor individuals) have pushed for standard formats such as open documents.  When you are tied to a particular standard, you are stuck with the platform.
  • @Vance Burks  Vance there are several very specific examples of things that make my teeth grind right here in Mr. Fowler's article.  I ran into exactly the same things. The biggest thing that bugs me about Office 365 is that you never know whether your document, or your edits are going to be there when you come back.  It relates to their decision to hold back the full feature set of the product, and the way they sync.  It's a flawed product architecture. With Google docs, it's sticky and I know that no matter what, my doc and my edits are going to be there when i return.  Also there are the annoying, unnecessary prompts - detailed in this article.  They are sort of Microsoft's signature, a symptom of their culture. I lived in Woodinville-Redmond for almost two years, and I never once met a happy Microsoft employee.  Well, there was one he has 18 patents and worked there for 25 years.  Then they fired him, and now he's unhappy too.  It's a very messed-up company. Unhappy culture.
  •  
    "I've purchased the latest Microsoft Office for every computer I've owned. It was a foregone conclusion. Dating back to when Word was white type on a blue screen, I used it so often I could recite the shortcuts. (Thesaurus? Shift-F7.) But Microsoft has run out of reasons to keep me paying. How we get work done on computers has fundamentally changed. For the new Office 2016, Microsoft wants you to pay $150 for collaborative capabilities that others already do better, free. It brings little new to people who rely on deep features in Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Its mediocrity led me to a larger conclusion: It's time for Microsoft to press Control-Alt-Delete on the whole concept of Office. My relationship with Office started to sour as smartphones carried my work everywhere while my Office files stayed in the cubicle. I began emailing myself instead of fretting about scattered .doc files. Google ran with the work-anywhere idea early. Its free Web-based word processor and spreadsheet allow people in different locations to edit a document together. With Google Docs and Sheets, there's no more emailing drafts back and forth."
Gary Edwards

Microsoft releases public preview of PowerApps business-app building service | ZDNet - 0 views

  • PowerApps also will integrate with Microsoft Flow, Microsoft's recently-unveiled alternative to IFTTT. Users will be able to trigger flows from within PowerApps.Under the covers, the PowerApps service runs on Azure, and integrates with Azure Active Directory, Azure App Service and Azure Media Services. The PowerApps service connects to Office 365 data via the Microsoft Graph application programming interface (API). It also can access data stored in third-party services via those companies' public APIs via connectors.The tooling framework that's at the heart of PowerApps is based on the Project Siena business-development tools that Microsoft began several years ago and then back-burnered.
  •  
    "Five months after delivering a limited preview of its PowerApps service for building custom business applications, Microsoft is making PowerApps available as a public preview today, April 29. PowerApps, which was codenamed Project Kratos, is designed to allow business users and business analysts to create custom native, mobile, and Web apps that can be shared simply across their organizations. Examples of just a few of the many types of apps users can create using PowerApps include simple cost estimators, budget trackers, and site-inspection reports. PowerApps connects to existing cloud services and data sources. It's designed to allow users to build apps without writing code or having to figure out integration issues. The custom apps created with PowerApps can be published internally across the Web, tablets and mobile devices, without requiring app creators to go through app stores for distribution"
Gary Edwards

Why companies are switching from Google Apps to Office 365 | CIO - 0 views

  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps.
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps.
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps.
  • It’s not just Microsoft saying that Office 365 is growing (COO Kevin Turner claims that four out of five Fortune 500 companies use the service). Last year, cloud security company Bitglass said traffic analysis gave Google twice the market share of Office 365 among its customers, with 16.3 percent of the market; that went up to 22.8 percent this year as more companies switched to cloud services. However, over the same year, Office 365 grew far faster, from 7.7 percent to 25.2 percent. Google has a slight advantage with small businesses (22.8 percent to Microsoft’s 21.4 percent) but in large, regulated businesses (over 1,000 employees), Microsoft’s 30 percent share is twice that of Google and growing fast.
  • It’s not just Microsoft saying that Office 365 is growing (COO Kevin Turner claims that four out of five Fortune 500 companies use the service). Last year, cloud security company Bitglass said traffic analysis gave Google twice the market share of Office 365 among its customers, with 16.3 percent of the market; that went up to 22.8 percent this year as more companies switched to cloud services. However, over the same year, Office 365 grew far faster, from 7.7 percent to 25.2 percent. Google has a slight advantage with small businesses (22.8 percent to Microsoft’s 21.4 percent) but in large, regulated businesses (over 1,000 employees), Microsoft’s 30 percent share is twice that of Google and growing fast.
  • It’s not just Microsoft saying that Office 365 is growing (COO Kevin Turner claims that four out of five Fortune 500 companies use the service). Last year, cloud security company Bitglass said traffic analysis gave Google twice the market share of Office 365 among its customers, with 16.3 percent of the market; that went up to 22.8 percent this year as more companies switched to cloud services. However, over the same year, Office 365 grew far faster, from 7.7 percent to 25.2 percent. Google has a slight advantage with small businesses (22.8 percent to Microsoft’s 21.4 percent) but in large, regulated businesses (over 1,000 employees), Microsoft’s 30 percent share is twice that of Google and growing fast.
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps.
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps. Motorola’s recent decision to move from an elderly version of Office to Google’s cloud service bucks the more common trend of companies who have been using Google Apps switching to Office 365.
  • 87.3 percent are using Office 365 services, with each organization uploading an average 1.37 terabytes of data to the service each month.
  • That fits what identity management company Okta is seeing. Office 365 is the most commonly deployed application among its customers (beating even Salesforce) and adoption is growing faster than any other cloud applications. It’s also the cloud service customers use the most, probably because that usage includes all the email users send and receive.
  • The only industry segments where Google Apps has more share than Office 365 are in technology; media, Internet and software companies. The smaller the company, the more share Google Apps has among Okta’s customers; but even in the smallest companies Office 365 is still in the lead.
  • “There are different dynamics that matter based on the company size,” McKinnon points out. “Large companies need manageability, security, reliability. You wouldn't see this acceleration of Office 365 in large companies without Microsoft doing a lot of work [in those areas].”
  • The majority of new Office 365 customers are moving from on-premises, but even companies that have already adopted Google Apps for Business are switching to Office.
  • Microsoft claimed they won back 440 customers in 2013, including big names like Burger King and Campbell’s, and the trend is continuing. Some of that may be the halo effect of the Office 365 growth making companies that picked Google Apps question whether they made the right decision. But often, it’s because of dissatisfaction with Google Apps itself.
  • The simplicity of Gmail and Google Docs clearly appeals to some users, but as one of the most widely used applications in the world, the Office software is familiar to many. “When you put these products into companies, the user interface really matters,” McKinnon says. “For email, the user interface really matters.
  • Google Apps is dramatically different from Office and that’s pretty jarring for people who’ve been using Outlook for a long time. It's like it beamed in from outer space; you have to use a browser, the way it does conversations and threading with labels versus folders, it's pretty jarring.”
  • Even if you like the Google backend better, you have thousands of users saying ‘what happened to my folders?’”
  • And it’s hard to use Outlook with Google, many customers report. “Some companies, they go to Google and they think they are going to make it work with Outlook; what they find out when they start using the calendar is that it just doesn’t work as well with the Google Apps backend as it does when you’re using Office 365. The user interface is so important that it pulls them back in.
  • If you’re pushing somebody who's used to an Office environment into a Google cloud, they're going to feel this vacuum because they no longer have the programs they're familiar with. It represents a huge investment in time that people aren't going to be receptive to. And you have Microsoft saying ‘for just $3 a month more you could have all these great programs you're used to. Now they’ve got the pricing so you get more than you get on Google, what Microsoft is offering is fantastic, and for $3 more it’s a premium worth paying. Microsoft is still the king of hill for a reason.”
  • “Quite frankly, Google is completely outclassed by Office 365 in this arena and despite the price difference corporations who made the switch to Google Apps to save money usually end up coming back within a year.
  • The primary driver of this appears to be Outlook integration over everything else, followed by the inability to do some advanced things that Microsoft Office excels at.”
  • For larger companies, this goes beyond the familiarity of Outlook into advanced features. “You can integrate Skype into Outlook, you can integrate OneDrive for Business into Outlook.
  • It becomes essentially like a command center, and there is nothing Google gives you that does that.
  • “The reason people have been moving to Google is cost,”
  • But a lot of people don’t find the usability and collaboration nearly as effective as Office 365.”
  • It’s not just Microsoft saying that Office 365 is growing (COO Kevin Turner claims that four out of five Fortune 500 companies use the service). Last year, cloud security company Bitglass said traffic analysis gave Google twice the market share of Office 365 among its customers, with 16.3 percent of the market; that went up to 22.8 percent this year as more companies switched to cloud services. However, over the same year, Office 365 grew far faster, from 7.7 percent to 25.2 percent. Google has a slight advantage with small businesses (22.8 percent to Microsoft’s 21.4 percent) but in large, regulated businesses (over 1,000 employees), Microsoft’s 30 percent share is twice that of Google and growing fast.Office 365 is even more popular with the 21 million customers of Skyhigh Network’s cloud security services, where 87.3 percent are using Office 365 services, with each organization uploading an average 1.37 terabytes of data to the service each month.
  •  
    "The combination of familiar software and enterprise-class support is bringing early adopters disappointed by Google's lack of progress back to Microsoft."
Gary Edwards

Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps in use together for many enterprises - GeekWire - 0 views

  • Okta, a company focused on verifying identities across devices, found that the average employee has access to between 10 and 16 cloud-based apps. Microsoft Office 365 is the most-used app, with Salesforce, Box, Google Apps and Amazon Web Services also making the top five.
  • Microsoft actually extended their lead over the past year. That may be, in part, due to the growth of Office 365 as the go-to way to licence apps like Word and Excel on mobile and desktop devices alike. And with more employees using mobile devices to get work done, they want the same access to Office apps as they have to things like Slack and Google Apps.
  • Office is also maintaining its dominance even as companies add Google Apps to their offerings, letting employees choose between Microsoft or Google options. It turns out that employees stick with Office apps for many projects they’re getting done on their own, but when collaborating they switch to Google products.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Email-killer Slack is also moving up quickly, with a 77 percent increase in adoption in the second half of 2015. For companies that use Slack, it is used widely throughout the organization. While Amazon Web Services are used by less than 10 percent of employees on average, Slack is in use by nearly three-quarters of employees at organizations that use it at all. That puts Slack behind just four apps (including Microsoft Office 365) in terms of saturation.
  •  
    "Microsoft has held its dominance in the software market in part because it is the go-to provider for many business solutions. Word, Excel and Powerpoint are essential pieces of software across almost any industry, whether they are used for presentations and memos or tracking expenses and marketing products. However, enterprise apps from competitors are growing in popularity, according to a new report from Okta, with apps and services filling gaps left by Microsoft's products. That doesn't mean Microsoft is losing ground, though. In fact, Okta found that Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365 use overlaps at more than 40 percent of companies."
Gary Edwards

This table shows why Microsoft is in unique position to lead cloud computing market - M... - 0 views

  • Many of our customers embrace Identity as a first step in moving to the cloud. Office 365 and Azure share the same identity system with Azure Active Directory therefore providing a simple, friction free experience for our customers. And with Office 365 commercial customers surpassing 70 million monthly active users, Azure adoption is quickly following suit. Once in Azure, customers tend to start with IaaS and then quickly extend to using both IaaS and PaaS models to optimize productivity and embrace new opportunities for business differentiation. Today fifty-five percent of Azure IaaS customers are also deploying PaaS.
  • Microsoft today said that Gartner has placed Microsoft Azure as a leader in its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service for the third year. Read about it here.
  •  
    Aug 4, 2016 at 18:30 GMT Everyone knows that Amazon is the current leader in the cloud infrastructure market by a huge margin. But it is not just about cloud infrastructure (IaaS), enterprises need SaaS, PaaS, and several others for a complete solution. Microsoft today highlighted that they are the only vendor recognized as a leader across Gartner's Magic Quadrants for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions for enterprise cloud workloads. Microsoft is in a unique position with their extensive portfolio of cloud offerings designed for the needs of enterprises, including Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings like Office 365, CRM Online and Power BI and Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). And Microsoft's cloud vision is a unified story that we're executing on with the same datacenter regions, compliance commitments, operational model, billing, support and more. The ability to deploy and use applications close to data with consistent identity and a shared ecosystem, means greater efficiency, less complexity, and cost savings. Take a look at the table on the top, Microsoft is a Leader in almost 18 different cloud solution categories while Amazon is a leader in only three of them and Google in none."
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