Microsoft apparently has scored a major coup in the cloud market. The software giant says as many as 33,000 State of Minnesota employees will be going over to their BPOS productivity and collaboration suite. Here’s the straight dope.
The reasons for the BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) migration given in the official Microsoft Online Services blog entry are what MSPmentor has come to expect: Microsoft highlights the platform’s security, availability, ease of migration, and low training requirements due to user familiarity with legacy Microsoft products.
Especially significant is the revelation, as per the Microsoft Bright Side of Government blog entry, that Minnesota’s BPOS deployment is hosted in dedicated cloud infrastructure with no access by other Microsoft customers and delivered over Minnesota’s secure network.
Still, we have to wonder if Minnesota’s BPOS deployment will still be prone to the cloud outages that characterized BPOS in September 2010.
Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but it’s significant insofar as it’s the first US state MSPmentor knows of that’s put all its employees on SaaS collaboration. In other words: it can’t be a happy day at the Googleplex, despite a constant barrage of PR diminishing Microsoft’s cloud efforts.
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Posted In: Software as a Service and Hardware as a Service
Tags: BPOS | BPOS Outage | Cloud | cloud adoption | cloud collaboration | cloud deal | cloud migration | collaboration | Google | Google Apps | Microsoft BPOS | Microsoft Bright Side of Government | Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite | Microsoft Online Services | Minnesota
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Matt,
Thanks for all the great coverage of the SaaS market that you guys are doing. I love it. Your twitter feed keeps relevant stories in front of me every day.
One bit of relevant information that didn’t make it into this story is that to my knowledge Minnesota didn’t even open this project up for bids to other vendors like IBM (LotusLive) or Google (Google Apps).
Minnesota already had an EA with Microsoft in place and simply decided to use BPOS under the existing agreement. Its a fact worth noting I think. Microsoft won in a situation where their licensing practices made it prohibitive for other vendors to even be considered.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9188400/Minnesota_moves_e_mail_to_Microsoft_s_cloud
Daniel: You raise an excellent point. Back when I was a cub reporter with InformationWeek, my primary rivalry involved the folks at ComputerWorld. I continue to respect coverage from both of those IT media brands. And we’ll give the ComputerWorld item a closer read.
Thanks again for reading and following us on Twitter.
-jp