Originally Posted by
Milo Minderbinder
Mike
what triggered the question? By coincidence I got a call from M$ yesterday asking if I was interested in training to help me market Office365 / cloud
I think i'm a little further on down that road.
We've been selling our own cloud services since 2006 (some of the earliest Hosted Exchange and hosted Backup), and despite it not historically being one of our big push-points we're now seeing cloud as being heavily pushed by marketing weenies who don't have the first clue about how it all hangs together. I foresee a big hole between the 'fully-cloud' and 'fully-onsite' working practices, and I just wanted to know whether it actually works in practice for anyone.
Incidentally, we're also signed up as Office365 resellers and have been for several months now, but the licensing is a massive swizz - as a VAR you end up selling your ongoing revenues to them and eventually earning almost nothing from each sale (ignore the headline percentages for year 1, look at subsequent years!), and an OEM copy of Office for your desktop can be had for approx the same price as 18 months of hiring it through the £15/month version of Office365 - hence the reason for the question, as if the web versions of the products are 'just as good' as the boxed/downloadable versions then the licensing cost is so much less and it becomes viable to tell my customers about it as an add-on - if not, then no.
