In a major coup for Microsoft, Amazon has reportedly agreed to spend over $1 billion over the next five years to license Microsoft 365 for over one million of its employees. The deal, which was first reported by Insider, would represent a significant shift in Amazon’s approach to productivity software.
Microsoft 365 is a suite of cloud-based productivity tools that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Amazon currently uses on-premises versions of Microsoft Office, but the new deal will see it migrate its productivity tools to the cloud.
The transition to Microsoft 365 is expected to kick off this November, with Amazon’s corporate employees and frontline workers being the first to receive licenses. The migration is expected to be completed in early 2024.
The deal between Amazon and Microsoft is a sign of the growing cooperation between the two cloud giants. In recent months, Microsoft has made a number of concessions to Amazon, including allowing AWS customers to run Microsoft 365 apps on Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktop infrastructure.
Microsoft and Amazon effectively control the lion’s share of the cloud market, with AWS accounting for 40 percent of the global market for cloud infrastructure services and Azure a further 21.5 percent, according to figures from Gartner.
The sources for this piece include an article in TheRegister.