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[Info] Microsoft Just Cut A Big Deal With NYC

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Snapped 2010-10-21 02:32:50

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finance.yahoo.com
Wednesday October 20, 2010

Microsoft Just Cut A Big Deal With NYC

Microsoft and New York mayor Mike Bloomberg held a press conference this morning to announce a big new contract for 100,000 city workers to use Microsoft software and services. The deal is expected to save New York about $50 million over the next five years, as a bunch of formerly separate contracts were consolidated into one.

But the deal is also a good example of how Microsoft can use its existing contracts to win business for its cloud based services, like the Office 365 service announced yesterday.

As with any Microsoft software deal, the details are far too complicated to cover in a blog post, but one main point is that a lot of workers were previously licensed for software they didn't really use.

Part of the new contract moves some of these workers to Microsoft's cloud-based services for "deskless workers." This is basically a very cheap tier of service--it usually costs $2 or $3 per user per month--that puts e-mail and some other data into Microsoft's data centers, then lets workers access that data through a Web browser (rather than the full version of Outlook and other Office applications).

New York is also saving money by taking data from servers that were owned and operated by various departments and consolidating them all into Microsoft's data centers.

This is how Microsoft is going to pitch its cloud services to its largest customers over the next two to three years.
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Read more @ »finance.yahoo.com/news/Microsoft···x=0&.v=6

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