Spiceworks Study Shows Cloud Bringing Changes to Productivity Suites

A Spiceworks survey shows that Microsoft Office remains the primary productivity suite used in most businesses large and small. But cloud computing is allowing Google’s G Suite to make inroads into Microsoft’s dominance. Productivity suites are the basic computer tools—word processing, spreadsheets, email, collaboration, databases—that business have been using since the 1980s. The Spiceworks survey shows the productivity suite market is in flux because companies are spending more money on cloud applications than they are on desktop productivity tools. This slide show covers Spiceworks’ findings based on a survey of more than 1,100 IT professionals and what the results mean for the future of office productivity suites.

Microsoft is still the dominant force in office productivity. According to Spiceworks, 82 percent of companies are currently employing on-premises Microsoft Office software and 53 percent are running cloud-based Office 365.

A significant number of companies (nearly 40 percent) are using both Office 365 in the cloud and the on-premises edition of Office, Spiceworks found. That’s because companies are paying for Office 365 subscriptions that allow them to install desktop applications on their client PCs.

That would be Office 2010 and 2007. As of September 2017, 83 percent of Office users around the world were using Office 2010, and 68 percent had at least one instance of Office 2007. In contrast, just 17 percent of companies have implemented Office 2016. Meanwhile, 21 percent are still using Office 2000, while 3 percent of users are clinging to the 20-year-old Office 97.

Google is Microsoft’s biggest competitor in the productivity market, as its software is being used by 26 percent of companies, according to Spiceworks. Seventeen percent of organizations are using the subscription-based Google G Suite, and 16 percent are using free Google productivity tools such as Gmail and Google Docs.

Although Microsoft and Google dominate the productivity market, open-source tools have a significant user base: 16 percent of companies are using open-source tools such as LibreOffice and OpenOffice. Apple’s iWork for iCloud, meanwhile, is used by just 3 percent of companies.

Company size can often be a predictor of productivity suite usage. For instance, 87 percent of companies with 1,000 or more employees are using Office, compared with 76 percent of companies with up to 100 employees. Open-source software is most popular in companies with up to 100 employees and least popular in companies with 1,000 or more workers.

Spiceworks examined expected corporate buying decisions over the next two years and found that the greatest number of corporate users—17 percent—plan to start using Office 365. That far exceeds the expected adoption of G Suite (around 2 percent) and on-premises Office (1 percent). Not a single company wants to deploy Apple’s iWork for iCloud.

Spiceworks also examined the features companies consider most important when choosing a productivity suite. Nine in 10 companies said that reliability was most important, followed by user-friendliness and security (81 percent). Seventy percent of respondents cited professional use as an important attribute.

Not all attributes are important to companies when choosing a productivity suite. For example, the survey found that just 45 percent of companies see “quality customer support” as a major concern when adopting a productivity solution. Only 48 percent of companies are concerned about the setup.

Spiceworks asked respondents to rank productivity suites across a variety of attributes, including reliability, security, professionalism and more. On-premises Office was considered the best option for “professionalism,” reliability and user-friendliness, according to survey results. Office 365 was tops for security, scalability and customer support. Not surprisingly, open-source platforms scored high marks for cost-effectiveness.