A building on the Microsoft Campus
Credit:
Stephen Brashear/Getty Images
A new report from Okta shows businesses picking up Microsoft's office suite
Microsoft's Office 365 has passed Salesforce.com as the most
popular service among companies that use Okta's device and identity
management products, according to a new report released Thursday.
From
November 2013 to June 2015, Microsoft went from being the fourth most
popular service to passing Google Apps, Box and recently Salesforce.com
to become the most-used app among the more than 2,500 companies that
rely on Okta's services. Those businesses range from large enterprises
like Intel to smaller firms with fewer than 250 people.
Unsurprisingly, 74 percent of large businesses with more
than 4,000 employees run only Office 365, while just 50 percent of
businesses with fewer than 250 employees subscribe only to Microsoft's
office suite. It's most popular in the U.S., Canada and Western Europe. 
Okta
Percentage of businesses using Office 365 vs. Google Apps
The massive adoption of Microsoft's
new Office services has been driven by companies that want to use
Exchange Online, according to Okta Chief Product Officer Eric Berg.
"I would say my street knowledge tells me that predominantly people are buying Office 365 for hosted Exchange," he said.
In
addition, Berg said that Microsoft has an advantage over other services
like Google Apps because they don't have to retrain employees who are
already familiar with using Office for tasks like sending and receiving
email through Outlook.
He went on to say that businesses
implementing Office 365 will likely be rolling it out to many more
users than something like Salesforce, since it includes applications and
services like email that are applicable to most if not all of the users
in an enterprise compared to something like Salesforce that's tailored
for one part of the organization.
Okta
The number of customers using Office 365, HipChat, Slack, Yammer and AsanaWhile Office 365 is ascendant, those gains didn't translate
into user growth for Yammer, the enterprise social networking service
that Microsoft bundles with many editions of its office suite. That
service's user growth flatlined over the past few months, even as other
applications exploded in popularity.
Berg,
a former director of product management at Microsoft, said that the
company has added Yammer as a feature of many of its Office 365 plans to
encourage adoption.
"I think what you see happening here
in the data is that Yammer, as an entity, as a product, as a business
has lost a lot of focus independently in pushing [itself]," Berg said.
"And what they've been focused on is integrating into Office 365, and
their bet is just as that hockey stick curve is going up on Office 365,
that's at least going to get everybody who buys that exposure to Yammer.
Whether or not they actually use it, that's another question."
While
Yammer isn't showing massive gains, its quasi-competitor Slack has seen
major adoption among Okta's users, with its customer base growing 50
percent between April 2015 and June 2015 alone. Customers who want to
use Okta's tools with Slack have to pay for the service, to boot --
there could be an even larger population of companies out there who are
choosing to just use its free tier and not integrate it with Okta.
Overall,
Berg said that the potential for new companies to come in and release a
product that takes the business world by storm depends on what market
they plan on entering. The enterprise collaboration world is still open
to new entrants, but it's going to be more difficult for other companies
to shake Microsoft's dominance with Office 365.
No comments:
Post a Comment