Microsoft Flying High After FAA Chooses Office 365

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is racking up a host of government customers for its Office 365 cloud productivity suite: The Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) plans to deploy a Computer Sciences Corp. (NYSE: CSC) cloud productivity solution based on Microsoft Office 365.

As the Microsoft partner, CSC will oversee the contract, providing 60,000 FAA employees and 20,000 DOT employees with access to e-mail, instant messaging, calendar and web conferencing tools, with security from multiple devices.

On a side note, with the “cloud saga” between Office 365 and Google Apps becoming almost a tit-for-tat scenario, I would not be at all surprised to hear a government announcement coming from Google (NASDAQ: GOOG)  in the near future. We’ll see …

Microsoft currently counts the U.S. Department of Agriculture; the Broadcasting Board of Governors; the states of California, Nebraska and Minnesota; and the cities of New York and San Francisco as government cloud customers. However, in May it lost the Department of Interior as a customer to Google Apps.

“The FAA’s mission is essential to how our nation functions, and the agency’s decision to implement Office 365 validates our approach to enterprise security, privacy and compliance in the cloud,” said Curt Kolcun, vice president of U.S. Public Sector at Microsoft, in a prepared statement. “Microsoft has supported government agencies such as the FAA for nearly 30 years, and as a committed partner we’ll continue to innovate in ways that help our public-sector customers improve efficiency and reduce operating costs while delivering better citizen services.”

Talkin’ Cloud readers can click here for an overview on the Microsoft partner program.