Jeff Teper’s tweet “Happy 5th Birthday” to Office 365 caught me a little by surprise yesterday. Has it really been that long? What was I doing June 28th, 2011? I was probably working on a SharePoint 2010 deployment. I know I wasn’t giving a ton of thought to Microsoft’s plans for SharePoint Online in my day to day. Look at how much has changed, since! I’ll join the others with a Happy Birthday wish.

Another thing to note in Mr. Teper’s tweet is not just the growth of Office 365, but also of SharePoint Online.

125 million team sites is a lot! And, I can see from the momentum around the work announced in the Future of SharePoint event, that there is “much more to come.”

Office 365 is the Most Popular Enterprise Cloud Service

Partly to honor this anniversary, GeekWire posted an article this week, titled, Five years after launch, Microsoft’s Office 365 is the most popular enterprise cloud service. In the article, the author, Dan Richman, quotes a number of sources, including cloud monitoring software maker SkyHigh.

From SkyHigh analysis:

one of every five corporate employees (20 percent) uses an Office 365 cloud service, up from less than 7 percent nine months ago.

That’s huge momentum for Office 365. SharePoint Online is represented fairly low in usage compared to Exchange and Skype, however, they count OneDrive for Business usage separately and that is the most used.

Graphic via Skyhigh Networks.

Another big indicator of future growth comes from anlaysis of a survey of Microsoft Partners, by harmon.ie:

cloud migration will account for more than half their business by 2017, a 62 percent increase from last year

Between, Office 365 growth and SharePoint engineering work bearing fruit over the rest of the year, it’s an interesting time for SharePoint Online.