Dive Brief:
- Microsoft is working to attract more small and midsized businesses (SMBs) to Office 365 by extending a service offering called FastTrack that was previously only available to larger companies.
- The company's FastTrack service provides engineers to help businesses migrate to Office 365 and onboard users, according to the company's Office Blog post.
- To further motivate new clients, Microsoft said it is expanding the FY16 Adoption Offer to include Office 365 small business plans and is adding $25 payouts per seat for customer deployments of 50–149 seats.
Dive Insight:
Competition between Microsoft's Office 365 and Google for Work has been heating up. In October, Google said it would pay business customers to switch to Google Apps for Work.
Last month,a new study from BetterCloud found that companies that deploy Google for Work migrate to the platform at least four months faster, on average, than organizations that choose Office 365. The survey also found that 35% of the companies responding did not previously use any similar enterprise productivity suite, demonstrating growing interest in this area.
Microsoft said in a blog post that it wants more businesses to “experience the ability for your employees to access team files from anywhere, collaborate in real-time from any device and get enterprise-grade security that works as hard for you as for the largest organizations.”
Last month, Microsoft said it was expanding the Cloud Storage Partner Program and launching further integration with Box, Dropbox, Egnyte, Citrix and ShareFile.
