GE to bring Office 365 to its 300,000 employees in 170 countries

Microsoft announced today that General Electric is the latest company moving to Office 365, which will bring the productivity platform to GE’s more than 300,000 employees across 170 countries.

Office 365, Microsoft’s cloud-based and Software as a Service modeled version of its popular productivity suite, has been a popular choice for many companies of all sizes. As WinBeta previously reported, Office 365 usage has been “skyrocketing” to surpass Google Apps and nearly catch Salesforce.com in terms of future enterprise deployment plans. Now with GE signing up for Office 365, its user base will grow by an additional 300,000.

In Microsoft’s Business Matters blog, GE’s Chief Technology Officer Larry Biagini describes why they chose Office 365. Biagini says that the previous idea of upgrading every few years was not sustainable for a company of GE’s size, and that “we wanted to get out of an environment where upgrades were a point-in-time decision, and that cadence of being able to take advantage of new functionality is something that we believe we’re going to get huge advantage from.”

Biagini also notes that Microsoft’s open approach to supporting solutions from other providers was key to their decision. He says:

“A one-size-fits-all solution is unrealistic for a company of our size, so the interoperability and flexibility of the platform, the ability to integrate with other tools was an extremely important piece. Some of our solutions may not come from Microsoft, but the ability to integrate has to come from Microsoft.”

To learn more about today’s announcement you can read on at Microsoft’s Business Matters blog, which details more about why GE chose Office 365 as the productivity platform for its worldwide operations.