Building on the Demand for SharePoint to Land New Customers

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With SPTechCon2012 happening this week, SharePoint is top of mind for many.   SharePoint continues to be a strong source of growth for partners of all types.  Interesting facts about SharePoint growth include:

  • As a standalone company, SharePoint would be one of the top 50 Global Software firms
  • We have sold more than 125 million licenses to over 65,000 customers, and have sold more than 65 million licenses for SharePoint 2010 alone.
  • In 2008, SharePoint surpassed $1 billion in revenues - the fastest product at Microsoft to do that, and it continues to grow at double-digit speed.
  • There are more than 700,000 developers building on Microsoft SharePoint.

Our partners in the Hosting industry are also benefiting from this strong growth with SharePoint.  While historically most hosters have focused primarily on SMB customers, as the industry matures many hosters are looking to move up-market. 

In conversations with hosters we’re finding many are looking to SharePoint to lead their entry into the Enterprise space.  SharePoint provides an opportunity to work directly with business units that are looking for point solutions and with tight deadlines that their internal IT groups are sometimes unable to meet.

During SPTechCon Rackspace shared their take on this approach and how they are investing in SharePoint as vehicle for new growth.  Rackspace has had a long standing commitment to fanatical support for SharePoint within their datacenter.

Shane Young and Todd Klint at Rackspace led one of the keynotes at SPTechCon and outlined some of the strategic investments they are making – including the recent acquisition of SharePoint911. What we think is great about this approach is Rackspace will be able to  offer support to SharePoint customers leveraging Office 365 or On-Premise deployments in addition to SharePoint hosted by Rackspace. 

This type of service provides business entities the ability to leverage all aspects of the SharePoint platform and to design and optimize a solution that is dovetailed to customer needs. It also creates new opportunities for hybrid deployments with a single team providing end-to-end support, following the trend in the hosting industry of providing even more options for customers.

With Microsoft a strong player in the Enterprise space and a close partner to hosters, we’re excited to see how SharePoint is a leading tool to help our partners grow and end-customers realize more benefit from the Cloud.   

So with this in mind, how can your business benefit from SharePoint growth?  How do you plan to do more with Enterprise customers?