In reporting better-than-expected fiscal second-quarter earnings on Thursday, Microsoft Corp CEO Satya Nadella touted his company's success in the cloud.
"Businesses everywhere are using the Microsoft Cloud as their digital platform to drive their ambitious transformation agendas," he said.
What he didn't mention was the role that one of the company's much older products played in the success of this new technology: Microsoft Exchange Server, which many of the world's largest companies rely on for email services.
When companies begin moving data to the cloud, typically a network of servers managed by an outside company, a common first step is to move email, often with other office software tools but sometimes on its own.
For companies already relying on Microsoft Exchange and Outlook for sending and receiving email, information technology managers say, turning to the same company to handle that data in the cloud seems like a logical move.
That's what happened at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
The school was looking to streamline its technology by moving to the cloud, starting with email, because it is "a pain to operate," said Bob Plankers, a virtualization architect at the university. "Aside from email servers, you need to worry about spam and virus scanning," he added.
For the transition, Plankers said he chose Microsoft's cloud-based Office 365 product because the university already used Outlook.
As cloud services rapidly expand, Microsoft will have to demonstrate that its products are equal to, or better than, those of its competitors in both quality and price.
Currently, many companies favour Microsoft because it offers more flexibility in terms of moving software around, say from a company's own data centre to the one it has outsourced to Azure, said Frank Gillett, an analyst at Forrester Research.
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