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Microsoft dives into cloud as resellers ask: 'What's in it for me?'

Well, we're not Google, for a start

What does Google's roadmap look like?

Barclay observes that “most customers will be looking for a hybrid,” with a mix of cloud and on-premise IT. Partners are able to make money from integrating the two.

Peter King, Office Server Group Manager at Microsoft, says that online services keep customers up-to-date with the latest versions of products such as SharePoint and Office, giving partners new features on which to build. “Migration may be a one-off, but [cloud] keeps the customer much more current with our technology, which is richer than its previous iteration, and therefore gives the partner new ways to go back and deliver value-added services.”

According to King, Office 365 is more than just BPOS rebranded. “With Office 365 we’ve driven much more towards parity between what you can do on premise and what you can do in the cloud. BPOS is probably 50-60 per cent parity, whereas with Office 365 it’s in the very high 90s. We’re giving customers the opportunity to choose the cloud without a trade-off.”

King adds: “The biggest change is infrastructural. We’ve added the full concept of federation for active directory, so now you can have single-sign on and extend that to an extranet. It’s radically different compared to BPOS, and from a partner perspective offers an incredibly broad set of options for them to deliver solutions.”

Tim Wallis is co-founder of London-based Content and Code, a large Microsoft partner with customers including easyJet, Virgin Atlantic, Comet, and the BBC. Although 85 per cent of its business is still on-premise, Wallis's company began as an application service provider and he is a cloud believer. “It’s a much better, more flexible model for businesses,” he says. "Partners can succeed by exploiting the new model, and treating cost savings from hosted services as a new budget.

“We’re seeing an upside as customers see the price and say right, now I’ve got some budget for training. If your value proposition is to set up and configure the servers and the anti-virus, you won’t see as much of that in the future. The balance of services is changing from setup and configuration to more business-value services, value creation services,” he says.

Wallis is an Office 365 enthusiast. “Office 365 is radically new. BPOS was Microsoft’s 2007 server products moved to the cloud. Office 365 was designed for the cloud and the range of functionality is far richer.”

As you would expect from a Microsoft partner, Wallis makes the case for Microsoft over Google. “At the moment, with the BPOS suite, BPOS has got a lot more enterprise functionality, but Google is very simple to use and very quick to set up. But when you compare it to the Office 365 roadmap, Microsoft wins hands down. The thing with Google is, you don’t know their roadmap, because they never announce it, whereas Microsoft has a published roadmap.”

Whether Microsoft’s move into hosted services is good or bad for partners is open to debate, but it is inevitable. “Everyone else is doing it,” says Wallis. “If you don’t make the move, Microsoft will just be a dinosaur left with only on-premise software and wouldn’t be able to compete effectively, and the business would be eroded.

"Clients would go Google or elsewhere because they’d want the cloud model anyway. Microsoft can’t not do it. Microsoft isn’t doing it to hurt partners, it’s doing it to evolve. Technology constantly evolves and anyone who works in IT must expect that. Change is what always happens.” ®

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