Even as Microsoft's cloud business grows, Office 365 adoption within small and midsize businesses (SMBs) across the U.S. remains very low, according to research from SkyKick.
Indeed, only 7.5 percent of U.S.-based SMBs use Office 365, Skykick says. The company claims that figure represents a "huge opportunity" for IT solutions providers. Take a closer look at the data, and you'll find 16.6 percent of SMBs with 51 to 250 employees use Office 365, which means penetration within companies with 1 to 49 seats is especially low. The data is based on SkyKick's email discovery technology, which analyzed more than 100,000 SMB company records across the U.S.
Office 365 Cloud Reseller?
ChannelE2E's spin?: Avoid the temptation to simply "resell" Office 365. Instead, figure out where you're gonna add value. The best MSPs and VARs have already solved that riddle. Now, they're triangulating between Office 365, Azure and on-premises IT management, ChannelE2E believes. The MSP poster child for such efforts is Aldridge's Arterian division.
Side note: The Skykick figures could also be a bit misleading, since many of those SMBs may have adopted alternative SaaS and cloud applications from Google, Zoho and hosted email providers. In other words, the total addressable market for Office 365 isn't 100 percent of SMB sector because rivals are grabbing some market share as well.
Overall, Office 365 is the most popular SaaS application, according to a Top 25 SaaS and Cloud Application List from Okta. And Microsoft is also chasing Amazon Web Services cloud market share in the IaaS sector.
