_Microsoft vs Competitors
Microsoft vs Google
Best productivity - Microsoft offers a richer set of capabilities, including Office, providing a better experience across the PC, phone and browser. Google Apps SaaS provides basic capabilities, very often leaving some users underserved.
Choice and Flexibility – Microsoft offers the cloud on your terms with seamless integration to on-premises solutions, to take advantage of your existing technologies and investments. Google offer no on-premises options; integration is typically provided through third parties or custom coding.
Enterprise Class - Enterprise level security features, trustworthy with finer-grained IT control backed by an enterprise support organisation with a financially backed SLA. Google’s support mentality is built on consumer apps and an SLA based on service credits, which does not provide the same level of assurance for your organisation.
Offering Strategy – Microsoft ‘gets’ the enterprise and provides a full suite of offerings serving low cost, basic needs up to and including Enterprise Information Workers who require the richest capabilities. Google on the other hand only offer a one-size-fits-all approach for every type of user, regardless of needs.
Best-in-Class – Recognised by many independent sources such as Gartner, Microsoft leads the way in terms of business intelligence, enterprise content management, unified communications and instant messaging and presence. All through the same familiar tools your organisation already use on a daily basis.
Cost – Microsoft offers a comprehensive pricing structure which is tailored to meet your requirements. To provide a comparable service, Google Apps has many hidden one-off and annual costs.
Microsoft vs IBM
Whilst offering messaging and collaboration tools, Lotus cloud services have many significant shortcomings when compared to Microsoft Office 365. For example, mobile access to calendar data is not supported at this time.
Competitively limited products provide a fraction of the capability expected by modern enterprises coupled with an inconsistent, chaotic user experience that raises the cost and timeframes needed to train your workforce to go about their daily business. Innovation driven through acquisition has resulted in a disjointed and often complex service offering.
The rest
Whilst there are other cloud service providers, such as Amazon, Salesforce.com, Open Office and Cisco, their solutions either do not provide a comparable full productivity suite or are aligned to providing services such as CRM, cloud compute or virtualised infrastructure services.