Microsoft 's Strategic Commitment For The Cloud With Sharepoint Online

“We looked across all categories and found that Microsoft best fit our needs”, says Brenna Berman Chief Information Officer for the City of Chicago . (2015) One of the biggest benefits to the city in moving its operations to the cloud was the reduction of managed infrastructure. The primary focus of the move was email services; however, Office applications and collaboration systems were also a huge benefit as well. The management of IT infrastructure is expensive and can remain a moving target from a maintenance and security

Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) is the world leader in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software specifically designed for small and medium businesses, enterprises and government organizations. Salesforce.com was the first enterprise software company to break the $1B barrier of CRM sales on the cloud computing platform (Salesforce Investor Relations). It is also the first company to successfully orchestrate complex product and services strategies entirely on the Internet. This company's ability to orchestrate connectivity, cloud integration, enterprise storage and enterprise-wide applications is revolutionizing the economics of cloud computing today (Hedgebeth, 49). The strategic direction of the company is to expand quickly off of its sales base of applications, into customer service and support (Salesforce Investor Relations). As research studies from Gartner have shown, the majority of software sales in CRM today are in Customer Service and Support (34%) followed by Sales (26%) and Marketing (20%) (Salesforce Investor Relations). Salesforce.com reported $3B in revenue for their latest fiscal year and a $270M loss. Salesforce.com's success in enterprise CRM against entrenched competitors including Oracle and SAP is noteworthy, as both of these competitors rely on an on-premises application delivery model. The on-premises model is significantly more time-consuming to implement and often requires companies to

The demand for computing capacity continues to escalate beyond the traditional limitations of mainframe-based systems and the hybrid approaches of client/server and relatively simplistic Web-based applications (Etro, 2011). Prior to the development of cloud computing platforms, supply of IT resources was deliberately controlled and limited by CIOs who sought to gain significant political influence by withholding data and information. The advent of cloud computing significantly re-ordered the supply of computing resources at first, and then later entire applications. The rapid ascent of Salesforce.com to a new standard for enterprise Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an example of how one company, driven by a vision of disruptive innovation, completely shifted the demand curve for software. This shift in

SaaS, or Software as a Service, portrays any cloud administration where buyers have the capacity to get to software/programming applications over the web. The applications are facilitated in "the cloud" and can be utilized for an extensive variety of errands for both people and companies. Google, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr are all samples of SaaS, with clients ready to get to the administrations by means of any web empowered gadget. Endeavor clients have the capacity to utilize applications for a scope of necessities,

With the current state of the economy, I have been spending a lot of time recently thinking about innovation, service design, cloud computing and disruption in general. At no point in my career has it become more apparent that we are in the middle of large paradigm shift. The recent economic events have only highlighted the importance to look for new ways of delivering IT Services in a cost effective, high value and timely manner.

To realize the promise of Big Software, companies need an entire new way of thinking. Where applications were once simple to manage and deploy with a couple of solutions across a couple of machines, companies must now roll-out many applications, components, and integration points spread across tens of thousands of on-premise and hosted physical and virtual machines. Enterprises are learning they cannot address the needs of their businesses and customers unless they have a sense of the capabilities they must build, manage, and deliver. In other words, companies must have the right mix of products, services, and tools to match the requirements of the business. However, many IT departments are undertaking these challenges with the approaches, processes and tools that were developed over a decade ago.

A technology deployment approach having the potential to be of assistance to global organizations to make better use of IT resources to augment performance and flexibility is rightly called Cloud computing. (Polze & Tröger, 2011) The essential automation of cloud-based technology facilitates organizations entrée to the precise computing resource and that also at a perfect time for a reasonable price. Cloud-based services, in addition to this, are packaged in a manner that explicit workloads are more effortlessly provisioned via the use of refined automation software. Dramatic enhancements in productivity are being experienced by users of these cloud services and as a result have reliable and regular access to the accurate mix of technology to decipher business problems. At the same time as these productivity expansions results from the ability of cloud computing to lift intricacy away from a single user, the benefits in terms of cost and productivity of the cloud rely on an exceedingly refined underlying infrastructure. (Forbes.com, 2015)

Thanks to its line of businesses, Microsoft has a privileged position to compete on analytics: the company creates the products adopted by many other organizations to compete on analytics, to have access to vast amounts of data, to understand how to store,

With distributed computing, in the event that you have a web association you can be grinding away. Also, with most genuine cloud administrations offering versatile applications, you're not limited by which gadget you must hand.

Large organizations as well as small startups have been focusing on the enterprise segment. Once consumer only products like iPhone (for business) and Android (for work) are now enterprise ready and widely used for businesses in the large organizations. Moreover, the business model shift from a "legacy" on-premises to the cloud based SaaS model is evident and that is enabling both, businesses as well as vendors, to be agile, work from everywhere, reduce maintenance/ownership cost and quickly scale to the evolving business demands. It 's not surprising that nowadays virtually every enterprise software offers a flavor of cloud or SaaS solution.

Salesforce.com spearheaded the cloud CRM platform that can be accessed entirely over the internet, that means customers do not need an infrastructure to buy, set up or manage the platform, they just need to log in and get the work done. Salesforce.com 's CRM service is broken down into these categories: Sales Cloud, Analytics Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, App Cloud, Data Cloud and IoT. Salesforce.com facilitates companies with an interface for case and task management, and a system for automatically routing and escalating important events. The Salesforce customer portal enables users the capability to track their own cases, includes a social networking plug-in that facilitates the user to join the discussions about their company on social networking websites, provides analytical as well as services like chat, email alert, Google search etc.

Cloud computing is growing in popularity every year and soon most businesses and individuals will be unable to avoid using it all the time. As more and more companies start using the cloud in their everyday business, software will have to continue to change with that growth. Many software companies that currently cater to businesses have already begun the move to cloud based services. Companies like Intuit with their QuickBooks product are starting to offer a cloud based version of their software. Many companies that offer Human Resource Management, Customer Relationship Management, and Enterprise Resource Planning software packages have already moved to a solely cloud based off software package. Many companies that make software for individual use are also starting to move to cloud based services. Adobe’s Photoshop is an example of software for the consumer being moved to the cloud. Before it would cost $1,000 to $1,500 to purchase Photoshop, but with their recent move to the cloud consumers can pay a relatively low monthly few to have web based access to the same software. As more and more companies more their software online, we will also see a rise in the idea of module software packages. The need to buy the entire software package or suite will all but disappear in the future. Businesses and consumers alike with have the ability to only purchase the part of a program that they need for only as long as they need it rather than paying full price. As software

Cloud technology is steadily on the rise. Many companies are steadily becoming a part of this expansive growth. Do you think you are missing out? Well, there are high chances that your company is already riding the growth, you just have not noticed yet. Here are a few instances that show that cloud has already infiltrated your office –

To realize the promise of Big Software, companies need an entirely new way of thinking. Where applications were once simple to manage and deploy with a couple of solutions across a couple of machines; companies must now roll out many applications, components, and integration points spread across tens of thousands of on-premise and hosted physical and virtual machines. Enterprises are learning they cannot address the needs of their businesses and customers unless they have a sense of the capabilities they must build, manage, and deliver. In other words, companies must have the right mix of products, services, and tools to match the requirements of the business. However, many IT departments are undertaking these challenges with the approaches, processes, and tools developed over a decade ago.

As new, innovative technologies emerge within the business landscape, entrepreneurs and stakeholders must learn to adopt and exploit the opportunities that they present. With more businesses aligning their strategy with the digital environment, we are starting to discover a new way of conducting business from the converging of both the virtual and physical world. Technologies such as cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and pervasive business analytics are all improving, as well as disrupting, how contemporary organizations manage information. Organizations such as Netflix, Black & Decker, Boston Scientific, and IBM are just a few companies that have implemented these solutions in order remain competitive in a fast-changing