Published on the 16/04/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
While Microsoft continues to gain traction for its cloud-based Office 365 – the company grinds on slowly toward opening a local Azure data centre, almost a year after one was first promised…
The Queensland Government is the latest in a conga line of Australian organisations signing up for Microsoft’s Office 365. Following in the footsteps of Coles, Coca-Cola Amatil and Hills Ltd the State Government has signed a three year deal for 149,000 of its employees to use messaging, email and Microsoft’s Yammer enterprise social network.
Queensland’s Education Department (which has its own Microsoft licence deal) isn’t covered by the Office 365 deal which the Government says will still save it $13.7 million over three years.
In New Zealand Office 365 deployments have been generally lower profile – such as those to the University of Canterbury and Westlake Boys School.
Nevertheless demand for cloud-based office applications continues to rise – Gartner has forecast a third of all office software will be cloud based by 2017. The choice is often between Microsoft and Google, with the former still seen as offering a richer range of functions to its billion Office users worldwide.
The launch last month of Office for iPad should prove a further spur. In one of his first major announcements, new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the iPad offering was intended to provide a “high fidelity Office experience on any device,” adding that Microsoft planned to “drive Office 365 onto phones, the web, PCs and tablets”.
It will however mean a change in revenue structure for Microsoft; witness the Queensland Government deal which had the minister crowing about multi-million dollar savings as a result of the move to cloud. Microsoft meanwhile receives regular, predictable subscription revenues.
As a result of moving to the cloud-based solution the Queensland Government’s data will be hosted in Microsoft’s Singapore based data centre. Asked by iStart about the level of comfort the State Government had with its data being held overseas, the Department of Science, IT, Innovation and the Arts responded; “The Queensland Government Enterprise Architecture (QGEA) policy provides guidance to departments on the adoption of adequate risk management and governance to enable them to make decisions associated with offshore storage of departmental data.”
Eventually however it noted departments would be able to leverage Microsoft’s local data centre.
It’s almost a year since Microsoft announced that it was opening a pair of Azure data centres in Australia in order to offer local organisations the option of keeping their information in Australia. Since then there has been little news from the software giant, although Australian MD Pip Marlow this week told The Australian newspaper that the data centres would open by the end of 2014.
