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Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft’s business division has announced Microsoft plans to enter the software as service market – aka Cloud computing.
Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft’s business division has announced Microsoft plans to enter the software as service market – aka Cloud computing launching online versions of its leading software range including Office.
Elop believes the software as service feature would particularly benefit the modern worker who needs access to their files on the go.
Commented Elop: “What we think is in five years, 50 per cent of the use of Exchange and SharePoint could be serviced from the cloud.
“Between now and then, a year or two or whatever, if it’s going to be tough economic times, that means we expect quite a lot of movement in that direction, a lot of people taking advantage of that,”
Currently search engine monolith Google is at the forefront of cloud computing – already the company offers free web services for everything from document storage to web accessed calendars, email and messaging.
Elop believes Microsoft will be able to compete with Google and says the company would even be announcing free versions of their best selling software suites (as long as you don’t mind them being supported by on board advertising)
“We expect fully that the full range of Office utilities, from the most advanced to simpler lightweight versions, will be available with a range of options: ad-funded, subscriptions-based, traditional licensing fees, and so forth. So you should expect to see that full array,” he said.
It is expected that Microsoft will venture into the clouds some time in 2009.
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