Office 365 is Microsoft’s fastest-growing corporate product ever, which has now overtaken Google Apps as the number one cloud-based office productivity software, according to a new report on adoption rates from cloud security broker Bitglass.
The report, titled ‘Cloud Adoption Report Episode II: Attack of the Clouds’ studied traffic data of nearly 120,000 global organizations using cloud-based analytics. Focusing on the leading enterprise cloud apps: Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps, SalesForce and Box, the report has tracked the adoption rate of enterprise cloud applications over the last year.
Office 365, which started 2014 with an adoption rate of just 7.7 percent has surged ahead, more than tripling its market share to 25.2 percent in 2015, leading Google Apps by 2.5 percent.
The report also shows that large companies with over 500 employees are choosing Office 365 over Google Apps at an astounding rate of 12.4 percent. Regulated companies with over 1000 employees continued to switch to cloud-based services, with both Google Apps and Office 365 seeing massive surges in growth rates, of 200 percent and 500 percent respectively. For Microsoft, this represents an increase from 5 percent to 30 percent market share for companies this size.
Overall, cloud-based products experienced huge growth in 2015, with 48 percent of enterprises surveyed using a cloud-based productivity and email suite, increased from 28 percent in 2014. Microsoft has continued to secure huge clients as the company refocuses on productivity under the command of Satya Nadella, and this report shows that at least half of his ‘Mobile First, Cloud First’mantra is beginning to pay off.