Microsoft says Office 365 adoption accelerating, but questions remain - tranwastookey

When Microsoft according its third-quarter financial results last week, company officials trumpeted several metrics all but sales and adoption of Office 365, the cloud subscription suite for email and collaboration.

Specifically, Microsoft said that Office 365 "net seat additions" grew five times compared with the very quarter lastly year, and that 25 per centum of the company's enterprise customers straight off sustain Office 365, which is now on a $1 billion annual revenue run plac.

Short on specifics

However, Microsoft isn't locution how many Office 365 seating area it has sold. Moreover, the 25 percent enterprise adoption stat includes both instances where the suite has been widely deployed and scenarios where it may be used in a limited fashion.

"It's a big claim to say 25 percentage of enterprises are using Office 365," said Michael Silver, a Gartner analyst.

CFO Peter Klein highlighted several multiplication during the earnings league call the Bureau 365 metrics, saying they reflect strong momentum and indicate that the suite "is real start to get scale."

Withal, when he was asked during the interrogate-and-answer part of the call if he could give a concrete number for users, he declined.

With this Office 365 impulse statement, Microsoft is trying to continue the buzz close to the suite, which it sees as the future of its on-premises server products like SharePoint, Lync and Rally, and of its desktop productivity applications likes Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

As customers who have those products installed in their servers and PCs are faced with the need to upgrade them, Microsoft wants to be there with its Office 365 cloud-hosted option, and prevent Google from swooping in with its competition Google Apps cloud suite.

However, the momentum arrogate would persuade more weight if Microsoft hardbound it up with more specifics.

"It would cost nice if Microsoft gave more contingent because one away of four customers haven't moved to Office 365 to a large extent," Gartner's Silver added. "What you're seeing is probably a lot of trials. It's hard to tell what that number agency."

The numbers game

Peerless should also allow that in the agone six to 9 months, Microsoft has offered versatile Office staff 365 incentives to canal partners and special prices to enterprise customers and consumers. It clay to be seen how sales and adoption will be affected at one time the incentives and offers destruction.

Another gene that could be boosting Federal agency 365 adoption is advance migrations to it from single of its bequest cloud collaboration and communication suites like Post Lively Small Line of work (OLSB), Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) and Live@Edu, all of which Office 365 has replaced or is in the summons of replacement.

In addition, Office 365 comes in many diametric versions, packages and prices that pasture from an electronic mail-solely option to packed bundles that can include the mist-hosted versions of Exchange, Lync and SharePoint, as advantageously as the screen background productivity applications delivered and updated from the sully.

Thus, it's hard to know with precision not only how the suite is being used and to what extent which of its versions and specific components are proving more or less popular, said T.J. Keitt, a Forrester Research psychoanalyst. Just about customers could be using exclusively 1 component while others could be using several, he said.

It's likewise worth noting that Microsoft defines "enterprise client" as companies with 250 employees surgery more, so the stat doesn't necessarily give a snapshot of the suite's range of borrowing in rattling large organizations with tens of thousands of employees.

At Forrester, the definition of "enterprise organization" is one with more 1,000 employees, Keitt said. Letting down the bar to a borderline of 250 employees allows Microsoft to qualify many much companies as enterprises for the purpose of this stat, he said.

Microsoft has been clear from the start that Office 365, which began shipping in the summertime of 2011, has been peculiarly victorious among smaller companies, specifically those with 50 users OR less, which describe for about 90 percent of its client base.

"I don't doubt there's growth and interest. Just from what we see in our client inquiries, there are a muckle of businesses that are seriously considering Microsoft's Berth 365 and Google Apps for cloud collaboration and communication," Keitt same.

Microsoft has also through a good job of publicizing large Office 365 deployments among businesses, government agencies and universities, he said. These featured case studies involve tens of thousands of users, and even in some cases more than 100,000 users.

What's non on the nose clear is which typewrite of company is driving the growth. "Is it the midmarket? Or a combining of the midmarket and large companies?" he said.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/451463/microsoft-says-office-365-adoption-accelerating-but-questions-remain.html

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