Microsoft to become corporate outsourcer - All your email are belong to us

By Nick Farrell @ Tuesday, May 20, 2008 8:28 AM

Section - Outsourcing/Outsourcing

SOFTWARE GIANT Microsoft said that it will become a major corporate outsourcer in the next five years, with tens of millions of corporate email accounts moving to its data centres.

Chris Capossela, who manages Microsoft's Office products, told Reuters that more companies will give up their in-house computer systems and shift to 'cloud computing'.

Microsoft has been spending billions setting up huge data centres across the world to form a backbone of Web-based services.

The idea is that companies would pay for their email using a web-based subscription service.

Capossela, a senior vice president at Microsoft, said one of the first projects out of the gate will be Exchange Online, the service offering for its Exchange mail and messaging server software.

Capossela said he was confident that it would become the primary application adopted by corporate customers. X