14 DAY TRIAL // Cirque du Soleil is one of the first companies to jump on Microsoft’s Cloud productivity bandwagon, a set of services that are currently still in Beta development stage.
According to Orange Business Services, Cirque du Soleil will embrace the hosted messaging and collaboration solutions offered by the Redmond company as a part of its Office 365 offering.
Orange Business Services will architect the migration from the existing infrastructure to the Cloud, enabling in excess of 4,000 of the Quebec-based entertainment company’s employees to take advantage of such services as Microsoft Exchange Online.
“Microsoft Online Services Premium for enterprises brings together cloud versions of our trusted communications and collaboration software enabling people to work together more easily from anywhere on virtually any device,” revealed Pierre Chadi, Regional Director, Quebec, Microsoft Canada.
“We are pleased to partner with Orange to offer Cirque du Soleil a solution that meets their IT needs for robust security, reliability, and user productivity.”
Orange Business Services expects to wrap up the initial stage of the engagement by mid-2011, and then will work to finalize the document sharing services migration by the end of the coming year.
“The main drivers behind this move were to obtain cost-effective scalability of collaboration services and seamless operational integration with our IT services outsourcing partners,” said Bernard Hébert, Vice President, Improvement, Technologies and Knowledge Management, Cirque du Soleil.
Microsoft introduced Office 365 in October 2010, revealing its new Cloud productivity platform built through the centralization of its disparate set of offerings including Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), Office Live Small Business and Live@edu.
Via Office 365, customers will be able to leverage not only the evolution of today’s BPOS, Office Live Small Business and Live@edu, but also the desktop version of the Office productivity suite per a subscription-based model.