DuPont, Spotless Group and Sunoco Move to Microsoft's Cloud

REDMOND, Wash., Oct. 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Microsoft Corp. today announced new business customers that are taking advantage of Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS) to enhance collaboration, improve productivity and lower costs. BPOS, available in 40 countries and regions, includes Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft Office SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Live Meeting and Microsoft Lync Online and helps businesses ensure optimum employee productivity, tighten security and stay current with the latest productivity innovations more easily.

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The customers announced today — DuPont, Spotless Group Ltd. and Sunoco Inc. — join the growing roster of BPOS customers including industry leaders such as Coca-Cola Enterprises, Doosan Corp., GlaxoSmithKline plc, McDonald's, Rexel and Starbucks Corp., as well as a large number of small and midsize businesses. Governments at all levels also continue to embrace the cloud with Microsoft, including the State of Minnesota, which just announced plans to deploy BPOS for 33,000 state employees, making it the first U.S. state to move its e-mail and collaboration to the cloud.

"We are delighted that industry leaders around the world continue to choose Microsoft's enterprise-grade cloud services to keep their employees productive and their technology fresh," said Chris Capossela, senior vice president of the Information Worker Product Management Group at Microsoft. "In fact, since the start of the year, the number of businesses using the BPOS has more than tripled, and we're seeing growing interest from organizations of all types and sizes."

Enhanced Collaboration Across Networks

Wilmington, Del.-based DuPont employs more than 58,000 people and operates in about 80 countries around the world. DuPont chose BPOS to replace its existing Lotus Notes environment. By migrating to BPOS, DuPont expects to foster greater collaboration among the company's global employee base and with a thriving network of more than 1 million partners, suppliers and contractors through a secure extranet based on SharePoint Online. The company also chose Business BPOS to modernize and standardize its IT environment.

"We needed an IT and security infrastructure that supports the heavy collaboration demands of an inherently global company and allows us to focus on our core business, without having to wrangle with security and other backroom issues," said Phuong Tram, vice president of IT and chief information officer at DuPont. "In Microsoft BPOS, we found an all-encompassing partner that has the capability to foster a culture of information management and walk along with us into the new century of collaboration and communication."

Greater Scalability, Familiar Interface

Sunoco is a leading manufacturer and marketer of petroleum and petrochemical products headquartered in Philadelphia. The company migrated to BPOS to upgrade the way it delivers IT across the organization and to move toward a more scalable platform that makes it easier to ramp up or scale back operations, as needed.

IT decision-makers at Sunoco also chose BPOS because it works with the Microsoft Office applications the employees already know and use, ensuring uninterrupted productivity and reducing long-term training and support costs.

"Apart from the obvious commercial aspect, a compelling draw with BPOS was that we were able to preserve a majority of the look and feel, in terms of what our employees were used to seeing on their desktops," said Peter Whatnell, chief information officer at Sunoco. "Since BPOS enables close integration between e-mail and Microsoft Office products, we could ensure a smooth transition without incurring abrupt changes for our user community."

Reduced Costs, Increased Agility

Spotless Group, an Australia-based international provider of contract management and retail supply chain solutions, migrated to BPOS in order to support its global work force while lowering total cost of ownership. Before the migration, with more than 37,000 employees and 4,500 contractors spread across geographic regions, it was challenging for remote employees to access the corporate network and for Spotless to disseminate information globally through e-mail or the company intranet.

"BPOS was the logical choice to upgrade our e-mail and collaboration solutions and deliver a highly scalable, supported communications environment without making a considerable investment in datacenter infrastructure and software licensing," said Anthony Stevens, chief information officer at Spotless. "While we briefly reviewed other competitive options, including Google, we quickly realized that BPOS would pose the least impact to our users since most of our server operating environments and desktops are already running on Microsoft platforms."

Spotless is nearing completion of the Business BPOS deployment process, creating a companywide, scalable collaboration environment that will increase information flow, build employee relationships and increase agility to serve new customers.

Microsoft today also announced a number of new Microsoft Live@edu customers, including Aston University in the U.K., San Francisco State University, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and California State University at Long Beach.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

SOURCE Microsoft Corp.