Microsofts Office365 Telco Strategy should make Google nervous

AT&T last week joined Verizon and a pantheon of major service providers in the  rush to offer MS Office365 email services.  good start.

Should Google be concerned? Well, I'm sure Eric Schmidt remembers only to well what happened when MS decided to kill Netscape.

Running the numbers from research undertaken by BackChannel in September 2012 Microsofts strategy of partnering with giant telco's is already biting into Google Apps for Business.

The graph shows the distribution of O365 installations by company size.

We looked at 22,000 UK companies with a recognised service hosted mail service and found MS 0365 had nearly 700 installs; so about 3%.  Checking the underlying data we see that many of the Office365 customers identified were BT SMB customers migrated off of BTs own legacy mail service, others classed as SMB had churned from Google, larger organisations from a mixture of established providers.

We can firmly predict that AT&T, Verizon, Orange,Vodafone and the dozen others partnering with Microsoft globally will have the same effect. 

In short Office365 delivered in collaboration with the Big Telco's is the start of a serious fight back by Microsoft against GoogleMail and Apps for Business and it is clearly off to a good start.

Should Google be concerned? Well, I'm sure Eric Schmidt remembers only to well what happened when MS decided to kill Netscape.

Fragmented market for $1 trillion worth of telecoms business sales

Provision of telecoms services for the world’s biggest companies is remarkably diverse. A survey carried out exclusively for GTB by BackChannel shows that the world’s biggest 500 companies do not concentrate their custom on a few key operators, and the operators themselves work in a highly fragmented market

Read more: BackChannel AT&T Verizon China Telecom France Telecom BT NTT CWW

Nearly 60% of the IP services that AT&T delivers worldwide go to US-based customers. Of the world’s large operators it is one of the most focused on its home market — only one percentage point above China Telecom’s focus on China for the IP services it delivers.
Both companies, this exclusive survey appears to show, have a long way to go to spread their business away from their respective home markets.
By contrast NTT Communications provides slightly more

Article by Alan Burkitt-Gray Editor Global Telecoms Business

TATA leaves C&W Worldwide a sinking ship

Tata Communications 11th hour withdrawal from negotiations with Cable & Wireless Worldwide sent the troubled companies shares into free-fall yesterday and left the way clear for Vodafone to snap up a bit of a bargain.

The estimated breakup value of Cable & Wireless is estimated to be around £2 1/2 billion, approximately £.90 per share. This may have led to the Cable & Wireless board to reject the £.42 a share offer made by Tata.  With CW shares standing at £.31 each as I type this, you wonder if they've gained anything.

Over the years of watching the ups and downs and further downs of Cable & Wireless it's often occur to be and my colleagues at Cable & Wireless would be a better fit with British Telecom supporting their increasingly successful BT Global Services organisation.

Here is an interesting if not terribly well-informed article posted on interactive investor on the 16th which goes into rather more details. The comment that Cable & Wireless is the provider of choice for 70 of the FTSE 100 companies is terribly wide of the mark, after years of decline Cable & Wireless is left as one of the many, many, many, providers that service the U.K.'s largest companies.  Don't believe the PR spin Cable & Wireless's position amongst these organisations is way behind that of BT Group and Verizon.