The notion of running everything in the cloud was first pushed by Microsoft at the 2009 Worldwide Partner Conference when CEO Steve Ballmer introduced the enterprise level cloud computing platform Windows Azure. While Azure was more of a “supercomputer in the sky” for shared computational power, it’s not something the average SMB would likely use. However, during that same week Microsoft presented BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) to address the needs of the SMB market.
BPOS delivered Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communicator, and LiveMeeting through the cloud and was designed to give SMBs a way to move from traditional licensing models …