Microsoft Announces Major Public Sector Cloud Wins

At this week’s Microsoft U.S. Public Sector CIO Summit, Microsoft Online Services said four educational institutions and 14 local and state governments are making the switch to Microsoft’s cloud platforms. The marquee customer this go-round is the Portland Public Schools district in Oregon, which will be making the Live@edu cloud suite available to its 8,500 faculty and staff and 46,000 students over the next several months.

According to Microsoft’s press release, Portland Public Schools technology staff analyzed both Live@edu and Google Apps when they decided it was time to move e-mail off of Novell GroupWise and add cloud productivity to boot. In the end, they chose Live@edu because of their superior “training and support structure, security, and interoperability.” And apparently a deal is in the works to roll out Live@edu to all school districts across the state of Oregon.

As per that same press release, here’s the list of the other three new Live@edu customers and how many seats they’re moving to the platform:

Notably, not all of Microsoft’s newly-announced public sector customers (the full list of whom is available in the announcement) are taking advantage of the Microsoft BPOS productivity platform – though some, like the town of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, certainly are.

Rather, several, including the City of Andover in Michigan, are merely deploying Microsoft Exchange Online or a hosted Exchange 2011 2010 server for e-mail. And on the other side of the spectrum, the City of Chicago leveraged Microsoft Windows Azure as the cloud platform behind an interactive city map for the Taste of Chicago event.

No doubt, these are impressive wins and are sure to build Microsoft’s clout in the competitive public sector cloud services market. But TalkinCloud couldn’t help but notice what wasn’t mentioned once in that long list of new deployments: a single Microsoft partner.

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