GSK heads for the clouds

(By Richard Holway 6.00pm 3rd March 09) Cloud, and Microsoft Online Services in particular, got a big boost yesterday when Microsoft won a 100,000 deployment of its hosted Exchange, Sharepoint and LiveMeeting Cloud-based services from pharmaceuticals company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).

A few points caught my eye. Microsoft’s claim that customers save “10-50% when they adopt online services”. I don’t doubt that BUT that’s potentially 10-50% lower revenues for Microsoft. Microsoft reckons that there is great and ever-growing customer demand to move to the cloud and, you won’t be too surprised at this, they say “There’s not another company in the world that’s going to have the breadth of cloud services Microsoft can provide.”

If you look in the blogosphere you will see that there is much talk about Cloud Wars withMicrosoft hurling abuse at Google over their recent outages. But, to be honest, Google is hardly trying right now in the enterprise cloud space that this order from GSK represents. Google is putting its efforts into consumer-oriented cloud applications. Here it is leaving Microsoft standing.