14 DAY TRIAL // Japanese carmaker Toyota today announced that 200,000 employees around the world will use Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud services for the next two years, as part of the company’s efforts to enhance communication and collaboration between its workers.
In addition to Office 365, Toyota will also install Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Lync and Windows Server on its workstations.
"Toyota's decision to deploy Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync and Windows Server to its 200,000 employees worldwide is further evidence of the enterprise-class quality and scalability of the world's most popular productivity platform, as well as another key milestone in our growing alliance together," said Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner.
This isn’t however the first partnership between the Japanese automaker and the Redmond-based software giant.
Back in 2011, the two companies signed an agreement to provide telematics services using the Windows Azure cloud platform.
Toyota claims that the new partnership will help the company reduce costs, but what’s more important is that all these services will improve collaboration between employees, as they provide enterprise social network, messaging and information sharing tools.
“The building of a communication infrastructure for the 200,000-plus users in Toyota and its group companies in Japan, America and throughout the world is one of the largest projects that Microsoft has ever undertaken,” said Yasuyuki Higuchi, president and CEO, Microsoft Japan.
Office 365 will also be available to home users in two different versions, namely Home Premium and Small Business Premium. Pricing will start at $99.99 / €76.30 (which is only $8.33 / €6.36 per month) for the Home Premium flavor that can be installed on up to 5 devices at the same time.