Ovum: Microsoft goes online and worldwide

Ovum gives a brief analysis on Microsoft’s international launch of BPOS. Unlike some other analysis I’ve seen trying to compare Google Apps to Microsoft BPOS, this highlights one of the main differences … Choice …

Microsoft’s recently announced Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) is much more than a challenge to Google Apps, playing as it does to organisations from five persons to millions, and allowing a combination of in-house and hosted deployment – the so-called ‘software plus services’ model. The release of BPOS is very timely, offering guaranteed availability and with well thought out functionality. However, there is still some work to do on the product that might make it appear like a beta release in the eyes of a CIO.

 

Mix ‘n’ match for customers and partners

The BPOS hosted products are: Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications Server and LiveMeeting. This package is priced at $15 per seat per month and organisations can subscribe to additional facilities such as archiving.

But this is not just cloud-based services like Google Apps, although that offering is definitely a threat that Microsoft wants to see off. Rather it is a software plus service offering that gives organisations that have the IT support infrastructure and wish to retain in-house capability the option to have their BPOS services linked to the corporate servers to provide an anywhere information service for employees, partners or customers.

Continue at source : Ovum.com