Avanade aligns services to hosted Microsoft products

Also releases part two of cloud survey.

IT consultancy Avanade Australia is focusing its attention on enterprise email and software migration projects including customers shifting from IBM Lotus to hosted Microsoft Exchange.

The company's A/NZ vice president Jeyan Jeevaratnam told CRN that Avanade was "supporting" a mix of telco, government and financial customers in shifting their corporate email platforms across to Microsoft's business productivity online suite.

The suite is also resold by Telstra through their T-Suite software-as-a-service offering.

"We're working with large customers in the telecommunications, finance and government sectors looking at Exchange as a potential environment to go to," Jeevaratnam said.

He also said that Microsoft customer relationship management (CRM) topped the hosted applications it was migrating enterprise customers to, followed by business intelligence/accounting, enterprise resource management and SharePoint.

Avanade also released today a follow-up to its cloud computing survey conducted by Kelton Research in March. The latest installment surveyed 50 organisations from Australia out of a global total of 500.

It found that the number of companies that had no plans to adopt cloud-based systems had decreased from 56 percent to 32 percent over the period.

Avanade claimed this indicated "a growing acceptance of cloud computing in the enterprise".

The report also found that enterprises were more keen on a hybrid enterprise architecture model rather than running completely in the cloud. Over half of the firms surveyed said they would use "a combination of cloud and internally owned IT systems" compared to 16 percent in the first report.