“We are absolutely leading at this point!” That was the claim made by Stephen Elop, President of Micorosoft's Business Division in an interview with Reuters last week when asked about his firm's place in the Cloud Computing market.
His claim was based on the idea that Microsoft's Cloud Computing applications have been endorsed by firms such as Nokia and Coca-Cola, the Windows Azure operating system for online applications is being picked up by developers and that browser versions of Office applications are in private testing. The future is in The Cloud, he suggested.
That vision took another step forward this week with the news that Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite is now available in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.
Beginning Monday until April, organisations in the 18 new countries where the suites are available can get a trial access – up to 20 users - to the suite or to the individual services by signing up online. After April, the services will become commercially available for purchase.
The suite includes online versions of Microsoft's messaging and portal software -- Exchange Online and SharePoint Online, respectively-- as well as Office Communications Online, a hosted unified-communications offering, and Office Live Meeting, a hosted Web-conferencing application. In the U.K. the suite will cost £10.04 per user, per month, and in Europe it will cost €12.78 per user, per month.
The other big offering in Microsoft's campaign to conquer the commercial cloud is its Deskless Worker Suite, a packaging of the Deskless Worker versions of Exchange Online and SharePoint Online that's aimed at workers who use non-PC means to communicate with colleagues and managers. The Deskless Worker Suite, priced now at a monthly fee of $3 per user in the U.S., will made available next month for 2.56 in Europe and £2.01 in the U.K.
Eron Kelly, senior director in Microsoft's Business Online Services Group, said the company expects 50 percent of its Exchange and SharePoint usage to be delivered online. "We do see this as a major trend for Microsoft and the industry," he said.
GlaxoSmithKline has signed a multiyear contract with Microsoft to offer the Business Productivity Online Suite and the Deskless Worker Suite to desktops worldwide. GlaxoSmithKline had been using a combination of Lotus Notes and Google Postini. With more than 100,000 employees, Glaxo will be the largest customer so far for this online offering. The company aims to reduce IT operational costs by roughly 30% and to introduce a variable cost subscription model for technologies so that it can scale or divest investments as appropriate. "When you've got finite IT resources, to be able to shift them to strategic projects and cut costs is very important," said Microsoft's Kelly.
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