Office 365 Crosses Huge Moat with Deutsche Börse Group Signup

Office 365 new client Deutsche Börse Group

Microsoft announced earlier this week that Deutsche Börse Group (DBG) will be moving to Office 365. Based out of Frankfurt, Germany, Deutsche Börse Group is one the world’s leading stock exchanges, with 5,283 employees at the end of 2015.

From a numbers standpoint, a 5000-strong team may look like a drop in the bucket for Office 365, especially when its commercial revenues have been growing at strong double digit rates for the past several quarters.

But the fact that a global financial services giant has decided to take up the cloud-delivered Office 365 is great news for Microsoft. And it possibly signals that Office 365 may have crossed a huge barrier with respect to companies that operate under strict regulatory environments and have stringent data sovereignty requirements.

Bank of America CTO David Reilly said in an interview to Networkworld, when asked about the bank not moving to public cloud: “”I don’t have to solve for the security questions” that come with using the public cloud, he says, such as where data is stored, who has access to it, whether the bank will have access to capacity when needed.”

And it’s that’s a very, very valid argument. Financial services companies and big banks like BofA have, so far, stayed away from the cloud. Most of these companies will be using standalone Office products as it puts them in control of their data.

But, with most of the current development and new functionalities moving towards cloud-delivered products, these companies will be missing out on a lot of advantages a cloud-delivered collaborative product would be able to deliver.

However, considering the safety and data control issues, financial services companies have so far decided to play it safe and kept cloud products as far away from them as possible. Microsoft will presumably have gone to great lengths with Deutsche Börse Group to convince them to hop on the Office 365 bandwagon.




“Microsoft’s innovative approach to helping our customers move to the Microsoft Cloud, while also meeting their regulatory obligations, including our Financial Services Compliance Program, gave DBG confidence in this move. Following our work with DBG, and by adapting our contract terms, Microsoft is in a great position to address industry regulations for all global financial services customers.

Germany is one of the most sophisticated regulatory systems in Europe, and having Microsoft Cloud customers in Germany shows how robust Office 365 is in meeting financial regulatory obligations,” said Ron Markezich, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft.

The size of the deal might seem small, but for Office 365 and Microsoft this is, by no means, a small achievement. It looks like Office 365 has jumped a huge hurdle, and we’re sure that Microsoft will use DBG as a showcase of sorts to get more financial services companies signed up to its office productivity and collaboration SaaS. And that’s a huge market to tap into.



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