The Office of Vocational Training and Employment Promotion (OFPPT) of Morocco, a public training institution offering educational training in 35 fields of study has chosen Microsoft Office 365 for its education and vocational training solutions. The OFPPT will also work with Microsoft to create 100 new Microsoft IT Academies across the country to continue with its mission to offer vocational training.

“The approach we’ve taken with Microsoft is a model of public and private partnership for advanced professional training in the ICT sector. The use of new technologies will actively contribute to human development, as well as support the growth of the national economy and ongoing infrastructure projects through effective, efficient and proven Microsoft solutions,” said Larbi Bencheikh, general director of the OFPPT.

Additional to this agreement, it is expected that Microsoft will lead more than 60,000 Microsoft Office Specialist and Microsoft Certified Professional certifications over the next three years via the OFPPT.

One huge potential benefit of cloud computing is the ability to encourage education via the use of on-demand services that are less costly and perhaps more accessible than on-premise and other types of solutions. This movet will drive customers towards the new SaaS model, but will also drive and encourage the use of Microsoft’s existing set of front office applications.

Dreamforce, salesforce.com’s annual user conference, has over the past several years become a highly anticipated and entertaining end-of-the-year fixture for the enterprise applications market observers (surprisingly, Dreamforce 2011 will take place in late August, and let’s see how that new timing will feel). Namely, in these prolonged times of bad economic news and businesses recoiling across the board, one could always enjoy the unusually high attendance and upbeat and “never a dull moment” atmosphere of the multi-day event, courtesy of salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff and his executive team.

While Dreamforce 2009 was mostly about the continued growth of the vendor and the unveiling of Salesforce Chatter, the company’s nascent social platform and collaboration cloud (as duly covered by my blog series), the overall Dreamforce 2010 theme was the cloud proliferation (and salesforce.com’s further diversification). Needless to say, this was in addition to the theme of continued growth. 

Read the rest of this entry »