Office 365 is the fastest growing Microsoft product ever. Microsoft has earned ridicule in terms of Windows 8 and Windows Phone but to me they are doing all the right things in this space.
They should have launched Android and iOS support a year ago but I suspect that hole is going to be shut soon. I suspect Apple knows that too, and hence is offering their less valuable product for free.
Just think how amazing Skype is going to be when its the primary way you communicate in real time with the rest of the folks in your enterprise (I know most of you aren't enterprise folks but if you are you get just how valuable this is when 99% of the people you need to work with are in another building or another part of the world). I have no doubt that is coming.
You are spot on. Exchange Online is $4 per month per user for 25 GB mailboxes. Office 365 is $6 per month per user.
They also pay commissions to Microsoft Partners each and every month. I work full time at an investment bank but I've helped several local companies (about 500 seats) to move from on-premises Exchange to Office 365. It's a ridiculous no-brainer for them. Most of them paid more in annual maintenance for their spam firewall than Office 365 charges them.
There were some growing pains as they moved from Microsoft BPOS to Office 365 but it works tremendously well now and all the early kinks have been ironed out as far as I can see.
Oh, and outlook.com is completely free and works with user domains.
Lync is the primary way to communicate in the large corporation I work for today. It replaced my desk phone. I would never want to go back to a traditional physical phone.
I'll pile on here. Lync's fantastic. Seamless integration, multi-device. Has phone support that's just plug-n-play (over USB). Proper presence info that just works. The tie-ins with Outlook/OWA/Exchange for voicemail and such is also really slick.
Slick and easy call management (forward, sent to group, VM), easy IM, group IM, easy escalation to screen sharing or voice and video conferencing. All of this is secured by your own TLS certs. IM history goes into Outlook, one simple place for all forms of communication from SMS to missed calls, voicemails, IMs and emails.
Edit: Oh, also, easy federated IM. We can now have customers federate via O365 and IM us directly. There are blocking tools in place to prevent abuse. But it's far better than having to list a Skype/GTalk/AIM/MSN ID.
I'd love to know of a non-enterprise competitor in this space (like why go to Cisco over MS?). Pretty much everything I've seen is not remotely on the same level. For example, they'll plaster a "Dial" toolbar by rendering on top of some other part of the Outlook UI, and then call that integrated dialing. Or you'll have to use a web UI somewhere and login to a phone just to change your call forwarding settings.
No particular pieces are terribly hard by themselves, but it's a massive amount of work to get it all really polished up and have it just work so wonderfully. Without the centerpoint of Exchange/Outlook, I think a Lync competitor has a pretty big uphill battle.
Obviously Skype is released but not well integrated with the rest of Microsoft's suite. It can be far far more and better integrated than it is right now.
Skype has been progressively getting worse and worse with each recent release anyway. I had to have my mom figure out Google Hangout recently to video chat with her grandson as Skype has become totally unusable for video on my devices. With every release, more stuff that used to work starts failing.
They should have launched Android and iOS support a year ago but I suspect that hole is going to be shut soon. I suspect Apple knows that too, and hence is offering their less valuable product for free.
Just think how amazing Skype is going to be when its the primary way you communicate in real time with the rest of the folks in your enterprise (I know most of you aren't enterprise folks but if you are you get just how valuable this is when 99% of the people you need to work with are in another building or another part of the world). I have no doubt that is coming.