Office 365 and the Family Tree - Leadership

Today we are excited to announce, Office 365, a new brand of services that I believe will lead customers to increase their adoption of cloud services. For the official news of the day, I recommend you visit our event  site. Go sign up for the BETA!

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve announced several new customers including DuPont, Godiva, The State of Minnesota and State of California have all decided to join existing BPOS customers such as GlaxoSmithKline, McDonalds, Starbucks, and American Express.

 

In fact, the number of businesses using our existing BPOS solution has more than tripled since the beginning of this year and we have companies as small as 5 users up to hundreds of thousands of user organizations relying on Microsoft as their trusted partner in the cloud.

 

Complete Offering

Today’s announcement means customers will have access to our software in a way which completes our vision to ‘light up’ the best end user tools with the best set of server products on the market.

In fact the value of Union brings the capability which other vendors treat as distinct software markets into one complete offering for your business.

 

Considering that the on-premises versions of these products consistently rank as a leader (upper right quadrant) in related Gartner Magic Quadrants, you can understand why customers of all sizes will be excited about the opportunity to gain access to such powerful set of tools. 

 

Upper Right More of the Time

Gartner Inc., one of the world’s largest and most influential industry analyst firms, is a trusted source for IT decision makers in all industries. One of Gartner’s best known research methodologies is the “Magic Quadrant” which assesses a market and its participants (vendors) to help customer identify a short list of vendors for consideration. 

 

According to Gartner , “Assessing a market and its participants is a daunting task. Vendor differentiation caused by differing sizes, levels of complexity and strategies can inhibit comparisons of vendor offerings, and the market's overall direction is often murky. Gartner's Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes solve these problems by offering snapshots of markets and their participants , enabling you to map vendor strengths against your current and future needs. You can read more here.

 

Products such as Microsoft Office, SharePoint, Exchange, Lync and BPOS, participates in 16 relevant Magic Quadrants, ranging from Business Intelligence to Unified Communications to Social Software and more.

This year, Gartner placed Microsoft’s products in the Leader’s quadrant – the highest possible ranking within these reports, in 11 of these categories, highlighting the confidence Gartner analysts have in Microsoft products and solutions. The 16 categories and 11 ‘Leader’s Quadrant’ designations include (bold means available with Office365):

 If you want to get more information about Gartner Magic Quadrants, go to www. gartner.com or call 1.203.964.0096.<-->