The biggest Windows 10 shop? Microsoft partner Accenture
Which company is the biggest Windows 10 shop? If you guessed Microsoft, you're wrong.
Microsoft partner Accenture, a global consulting company, is on track to become "the largest consumer of Windows 10," say the two companies.
By 2018, Accenture will have migrated all of its 400,000 employees to Windows 10 in a move that will have taken two years. (Accenture has 400,000 employees?! Microsoft has about 114,000.)
Currently, Accenture has migrated somewhere between 250,000 and close to 300,000 users to Windows 10, according to information shared on June 28.
In a video accompanying the latest statistics on the Microsoft Windows blog site, it appears that Accenture also currently has 450,000 Office 365 mailboxes, 16,000 SharePoint sites and 99,500 smartphones and tablets enrolled in mobile-device management (which I take to be Microsoft's Enterprise Mobility + Security suite products).
Update: Or maybe not, re: Microsoft's Enterprise Mobility + Security. I am hearing Accenture is using, at least in part, VMware's AirWatch for mobile-device management.
Given Accenture's role in selling and servicing Microsoft technologies, it's not surprising the consulting company is all-in with Microsoft technologies and wants to be a showcase for them. But the 400,000 figure is interesting, given Microsoft's continued push to get more enterprise customers to adopt Windows 10.
Microsoft officials said in May that there are currently 500 million monthly active devices running Windows 10. Of these, more than 50 million are business users, according to Microsoft's own numbers.
In an explainer on its site, Accenture noted that it began its Windows 10 upgrade project in September 2015. The first step was to test all business applications and validate that they could run on Windows 10. By April 2016, initial deployment of PCs loaded with Windows 10 began.
Accenture started by deploying brand-new PCs preloaded with Windows 10 and offer early adopter employees the chance to upgrade manually. IN August 2016, Accenture began moving Windows 7 users to Windows 10 using an in-place upgrade tool and OneDrive for file distribution.
In addition to being the largest Windows 10 consumer to date, Accenture also has the biggest OneDrive in the world, at more than six petabytes, Microsoft officials said in today's blog post.