Atten-hut! U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs Marches to the Cloud with Office 365

The following is a post from Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Corporate Communications, highlighting some of Microsoft’s recent cloud customer wins with Office 365.


We’ve been kind of busy lately. With all of our recent news around Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Microsoft Surface, Xbox LIVE and Halo 4, several big-time customer wins for Office 365 may have flown under your radar. 

Today’s news that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs will deploy Office 365 for Government with Hewlett-Packard to 15,000 of its employees (expanding later to up to 600,000 employees agencywide) is just the latest evidence that our cloud-based productivity offering has gained significant traction. If you don’t believe me, you can read more about some of the gains we’ve made against the competition here. 🙂

The deployment of Office 365 by the Department of Veterans Affairs is merely the latest chapter in Microsoft’s burgeoning cloud services story. In early August, luxury audio and video systems maker Bang & Olufsen adopted Microsoft Office 365 to unify its e-mail, calendaring, collaboration and communication. Later that month, the County of Santa Clara, Calif. did the same for 15,000 employees.

Then in October, we landed several more marquee Office 365 customers with Toyota Motor Corp. (200,000 employees); the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes Commerciales (EPHEC) in Brussels (4,700 students); Duke University, Emory University, Thomas Jefferson University, University of Iowa and University of Washington; and the Environmental Protection Agency (25,000 employees). Even more are available here.

We’re not stopping there though. As in the consumer market, social has become inextricably woven into what we do in the workplace. To that end, we talked on Monday about how Yammer, SharePoint and Office 365 are coming together to provide our customers – both large and small – with a powerful, secure and integrated approach to social collaboration.

We’ve spent a LOT of time recently talking about our consumer devices and services. But our business services are as significant and as relevant as Xbox Music or Bing News. As Steve Ballmer said in his recently shareholder letter, helping businesses and government organizations like Veterans Affairs move to the cloud is one of our biggest opportunities.

Our customers clearly see the opportunity to make their employees or students more productive and collaborative. So, while the media may spend the next several weeks monitoring foot traffic to the malls, the march of businesses and government and educational institutions on their path to the cloud is another story worth watching.

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