Infotech Lead Asia: Automobile major Toyota Motor has selected Microsoft’s platforms to build its communications and collaboration infrastructure.
Toyota Motor Sales USA and other affiliates in North America started deployment of Microsoft Office 365-dedicated cloud services as their exclusive environment in June 2012.
In Japan and other overseas affiliates, Toyota will be using a hybrid model, with on-premises editions of Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Lync and Windows Server.
Microsoft will help Toyota provide these services to more than 200,000 employees around the world during the next two years.
The deployment of Microsoft technology platform is aimed at supporting mobile devices, reducing costs, and improving collaboration between employees with enterprise social networking, conferencing, messaging and information-sharing tools.
“We strongly believe that Microsoft has the most capable platform that delivers ease, excellence and efficiency required to provide the communication experience our employees expect,” said Shigeki Tomoyama, managing officer at Toyota.
“Toyota’s decision to deploy Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync and Windows Server to its 200,000 employees worldwide is further evidence of the enterprise-class quality and scalability of the world’s most popular productivity platform, as well as another key milestone in our growing alliance together,” said Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner.
In April 2011, Toyota and Microsoft partnered to provide telematics services using the Windows Azure cloud platform.
“I am delighted that, following the forging of our strategic agreement in 2011, Toyota has chosen the Microsoft platform to build its global IT communication infrastructure and that our two companies are further expanding their partnership as a result,” said Yasuyuki Higuchi, president and CEO, Microsoft Japan.
