Office 365 Virtually Pays for Itself

From PC World: Microsoft has launched the public beta of the highly-anticipated Office 365. There is a lot to like about the cloud-based suite, but one of the most compelling features of the service might just be the price.

Starting at $6 per seat per month, Office 365 is almost a no-brainer for small and medium companies. Organizations with fewer than 50 users typically don't have a dedicated IT administrator, and lack both the skills and the budget to implement and maintain the infrastructure necessary to deliver what Office 365 does. For a paltry $72 per user per year, these companies get the benefit of Exchange e-mail, Lync instant messaging, SharePoint collaboration, and the Office Web Apps productivity suite.

At first glance, it may seem that a service like Office 365 is actually targeted at, or uniquely suited for smaller businesses like these. However, when you start to dig into the math a little more, it quickly becomes evident that even the largest organizations could operate more efficiently, and cut costs at the same time by adopting Office 365.

A large company may have thousands or tens of thousands of employees, and generally has at least one data center--possibly more depending on how big the company is and how dispersed it is geographically. The servers have to be maintained, powered, and cooled. The applications have to be monitored, and the data has to be backed up. In order to provide some resiliency and ensure availability, that effort may be duplicated at multiple data centers that all require trained, expert personnel to execute it all.

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