Office 365 versus Microsoft Hosting Providers

Is Microsoft Office365, the successor of BPOS,  going to replace the Microsoft Hosting solution of existing Service providers ? I don’t think so…

Office365 is the successor of BPOS (Microsoft’s Business Productivity suite). The Office365 suite tends to have a more success as the BPOS suite, which certainly in Europe did not break any records. Office365 is built on better products, supporting real multi-tenancy . Not only the exchange offering but also the Sharepoint and Lync are now fully cloud services at a very interesting price.

So why is Office365 not going to replace the Microsoft offerings from existing hosting providers ?

Well first-of-all, organization still base their choice of products and service on advice from their partners. Don’t forget that a lot of customers candidate of collaboration cloud solutions are not IT –aware and they follow in most cases the advice of their ‘current’ IT partners.

As the Office365 business model is still mostly built on a commission based model (except for the happy few which could sign up for an aggregation contract) IT partners will tend to go for a model which gives the complete control, thus also the financial, of their customers.

Second, The Office365 offering only delivers a part of an IT solution for small and medium businesses.  For a large group of them, once they have made up their mind to move to the cloud, they also want to outsource the rest of their IT demands into the cloud.  Solutions such our CloudPlaza brokerage cloud allow customer to outsource their complete IT demand into the cloud with integrated security. This  is not possible with just Office365. Even if customers start-off with Office365, they will migrate to fully managed service providers in the future.

Third reason has to do with functionality and availability. Office365 is on it’s own a great product but have some limitations. The version for small and medium enterprises only allows to send e-mails towards maximum 500 recipients ! This could be a problem for them. Also Microsoft demand that you migrate your DNS management to them, but what if you have important websites or e-commerce ? do you want do depend on them for your DNS records ?

We see Office365 more as an enables then as a competitor. The sales and Marketing of Microsoft will help customers take the move to the cloud. Customers will want more from the cloud which drives them to solutions such as our CloudPlaza Borkerage cloud, which is made for, and supported by, our partners, delivering the same services as they are used to do, the only difference is the way how it is done and invoiced.