Microsoft today won a major public sector contract in the US for its subscription based productivity suite Office 365. The U.S. Army PEO EIS has awarded 50,000 seats of Microsoft Office 365 to Microsoft and Dell for Cloud Services, including e-mail and calendaring, Office Web Apps, unified capabilities like Microsoft Lync, and collaboration tools like SharePoint. Public sector enterprise mainly demands enterprise and security-ready solutions in which Microsoft clearly has advantage over_other cloud players like Google. The Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) is available to any Department of Defense (DoD) Service, agency and mission partner without additional competitive process. This opportunity gives Microsoft the ability to work with civilian agencies and federal entities at all levels to provide commercial cloud services, opening up new mobile opportunities. Adopting Office 365 is a significant step forward for the Department of Defense in fulfilling the DoD Cloud Computing Strategy of leveraging commercial cloud services. Securely combining commercial and government services demonstrates the Army’s commitment to build on the successful DoD Enterprise Email (DEE) initiative....

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