14 DAY TRIAL // North Carolina’s Mecklenburg County is one of the places around the world where Microsoft’s products are basically the best solutions for whatever purpose, so local authorities have recently decided to go all-in on services and devices belonging to the software giant.
The largest county in North Carolina has thus decided to deploy a total of 6,500 seats of Microsoft Office 365 and to purchase 175 Surface Pro tablets. At the same time, officials also bought 50 terabytes of Windows Azure, which is said to help them cut down the overall costs to only 30 cents per gigabyte.
What’s more, the county said that it wanted to increase the number of Surface Pro tablets used locally to more than 1,000 by August 1, while some employees would be provided with Surface 2 devices in the next months.
“We are working toward ensuring that all our employees have their own device, and we can’t keep up with the demand we’re receiving from excited workers. It really has helped to increase their enthusiasm around how they do their jobs,” Cliff DuPuy, technical services director at Mecklenburg County, said.
“The cost savings with Windows Azure are tremendous,” DuPuy said. “Our storage costs used to be $21 per GB; now, with Windows Azure, we are around 30 cents per GB.”
Basically, the whole move is supposed to cut down costs and boost productivity as much as possible, with early figures showing that Microsoft’s products are quite effective from this point of view. For example, the Youth and Family Services Department reported $3.2 million (€2.1 million) in productivity savings per year thanks to Surface Pro tablets, which cuts down costs with traditional computers and also boosts productivity on the go for all employees in the county.
Of course, that’s pretty great news for Microsoft, as the company still continues its transition to devices and services and wants to put the focus more on these categories.
Former CEO Steve Ballmer launched in August 2013 the One Microsoft transformation plan that’s said to push the Redmond-based empire to devices and services and thus give the company more changes to monetize its business in non-software market areas.
Bringing more businesses on board and boosting the revenues of cloud and hardware units are clearly priorities for Microsoft, even though it continues to improve the Windows platform and make it more appropriate for a wider array of devices, including tablets and desktop computers.