Microsoft says that more than 50,000 organizations have started trials of Office 365 — a rate of more than one every 25 seconds in the two weeks since the cloud-based productivity service was released. Businesses of all sizes are embracing the service including major global brands such as American Red Cross, which has announced it will use Office 365. Microsoft recently commissioned a TEI study conducted by Forrester Consulting that shows a composite organization of midsize customers could see a risk-adjusted ROI of more than 300 percent with a payback period of just two months with Office 365.
In response to growing customer demand, the ecosystem of Microsoft partners has more than doubled in the last year and now includes more than 41,000 partners and 300,000 trained specialists on the cloud service.
Reinforcing Redmond’s commitment to delivering customers the best possible cloud experience and creating a path for partners to transition their businesses to the cloud, Kirill Tatarinov, president of Microsoft Business Solutions, announced that the next update of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online will be available in the fourth quarter of 2011.
This update will enable partners to offer enterprise customers Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online with Microsoft Office 365 and will feature enhanced social collaboration capabilities. In addition, new Microsoft Dynamics ERP RapidStart Services were announced, which help partners quickly configure and set up consistent and repeatable steps common across the life cycle of an ERP deployment, reducing the initial implementation time so they can focus on delivering profitable value-added services. Built on the Windows Azure platform, the extensible service will be available in September for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012.
