Yesterday marked Office 365’s fifth birthday. In those short five years, the cloud-based productivity suite has overtaken the competition in terms of market share and become a significant source or revenue for Microsoft.
Now a new report by Skyhigh looks at the success of Office 365 from a slightly different set of statistics. And Skyhigh concludes over the last three quarters, Office 365 has rocketed past all other cloud providers “to emerge as the most widely used enterprise cloud service by user count.”
The Findings
Skyhigh’s findings come from their analysis of 27 million users working at over 600 companies across the globe. With this data from their Cloud Access Security Broker service, they then compared the usage levels during Q3 2015 with Q2 of 2016 to analyze Office 365’s growth.
The most striking finding was the growth in the percentage of employees using at least one Office 365 application. That figure grew from 6.8% in Q3 2015 to 22.3% in Q2 2016. In other words, in roughly nine months Office 365 usage grew by 320%.
Skyhigh found that Office 365 is the most widely used enterprise cloud service in terms of user count. The report states that they analyzed the usage of over 20,000 cloud services, but it’s not entirely clear what is the basis of comparison and who Microsoft is being compared to.
Regardless, the report reveals some interesting details on usage rates for specific Office 365 applications. OneDrive for Business is the clear leader both regarding penetration rates of companies with 100+ users, and active use. Exchange Online comes in second, but Skype for Business was used more actively than Exchange Online. There is also a report of how the apps are used across different industries.
One thing that is certainly clear from the data, is there isn’t much love for Yammer. The Social Networking service was barely above 1% for active users. Though it remains to be seen in the coming quarters and years how Microsoft’s purchase of the professional network LinkedIn could alter Yammer’s future.
Skyhigh’s analysis demonstrates some impressive recent growth figures for Office 365. It must help add to the Office team’s sense of accomplishment in celebrating the five year mark for their move of Office to the cloud.
