Microsoft Office 365 delivers hosted communication and collaboration tools that feature high availability, comprehensive security and simplified IT management. Office 365 is a new cloud service that brings enterprise-grade productivity to everyone, helping professionals and smaller organizations get access to enterprise-grade productivity solutions for the first time, and helping larger organizations reduce costs and stay current with the latest innovations more easily. This is an important announcement for the industry and Microsoft. You can learn more about Office 365 on the new Office 365 blog and at the Microsoft News Center.

In the small and midsize business (SMB) segment, hosted e-mail is extremely fragmented — with Microsoft Hosted Exchange accounting for only a small percentage of the space — and this is where we see a huge opportunity for both Microsoft and its hosting provider partners to grow. Within the current landscape, we’re continuing to see significant growth rates of partner Hosted Exchange seats, with an 18 percent increase worldwide last year.

Office 365 for small businesses is targeted at customers with up to 50 users. It includes access from virtually anywhere to e-mail, documents, contacts and calendars, and is easy to try out, simple to learn and straightforward to use. It works with Microsoft Office, which most of these small businesses are already using, and is simple to manage without IT expertise due to its basic administration features. Office 365 for small businesses is backed by Microsoft with a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee.