"All of our salespeople will be leading with cloud," said Menzione. "The message from (Microsoft CEO) Steve Ballmer is that we are all in with the cloud. Cloud is the way we lead our discussions with our customers. . . . We are breaking glass within Microsoft," he said. "It (The Cloud) is changing our business models, processes, and product portfolio."
To back up that talk, Microsoft is adding at least 300 and possibly as many as 500 direct sales reps for public-sector accounts as the current administration has been aggressive in pushing the cloud model as a primary way for government organizations to rein in bloated IT budgets, failed projects, poor customer service, and low levels of accountability in many public-sector IT organizations.
And Menzione took a direct shot at Google, which he said is ill-equipped to compete at the enterprise level in spite of its long cloud legacy, according to the crn.com article:
"Google is an ad model," he said. " We are an enterprise model. The class of services we are offering are enterprise-class services. It is not consumer e-mail we are just talking about here. This is enterprise-class scale with financial SLAs (Service Level Agreements)."
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