Ron Johnson may not be as common as the name Steve Jobs but in the world of Apple, he is credited with driving the company’s retail roll-out which quickly set the benchmark for industry best practices. After helping Apple to rapidly expand and dominate its retail presence, Johnson was snagged by jcpenney to help revitalize the aging brand with hopes of growing the company in the same way he did at Apple.
Despite his history with Apple, Ron Johnson’s company has announced that they will be moving to Office 365, which is another notch in the belt for Microsoft who has made a string of high profile announcements for large organisations moving to its cloud based Office suite.
Kristen Blum, chief technology officer, jcpenney, had the following to say about making the move to Office 365:
“In selecting a cloud solution, we were looking for a partner who would support our goal of becoming America’s favorite store,” said Kristen Blum, chief technology officer, jcpenney. “And when we realized that we could improve customer service even more by providing cloud-based collaboration tools to increase communication between team members, it was easy to choose Microsoft and Office 365.”
Now we know that Johnson would have a hard time going into a corporation and convincing the company to switch from Windows to OS X, it still feels a bit ironic that their CEO, who made his fame at Apple, is making a big switch internally to Office 365.
Considering that jcpenney has 177,000 employees and more than 1000 stores, this is a big move for the company and a big win for Microsoft’s Office 365 platform.
Source: Microsoft