Microsoft’s massive co-creation cloud deal with the London Stock Exchange sets the stage for an innovative high-scale deployment of Teams with great potential to disrupt how hundreds of thousands of financial-services professionals access and analyze data and collaborate.
(You can read my analysis of that megadeal from yesterday.)
While this Teams portion of the 10-year, $5-billion partnership was relegated to the latter portion of the original announcement from Microsoft, I believe it has the potential to become a significant game-changer for not only the London Stock Exchange and its clients but also the entire Teams business. That’s because the Microsoft-LSEG agreement calls for some big-time innovations centered on Teams and underscores Teams’ rapid evolution from being an extremely popular workflow application to also becoming a platform on which Microsoft customers themselves are building thousands of innovative new workflows and applications.
If Microsoft and the London Stock Exchange are able to bring this big new vision for Teams to fruition, it would be an additional big element buttressing CEO Satya Nadella’s frequently cited claim that Microsoft is uniquely qualified to address the needs of every part of its customers’ “digital estates.”
Here’s how Microsoft, in the blog post cited above, framed this huge new Teams opportunity:
“The financial-markets community spends a large part of their day working across multiple terminals and platforms, disparate data sets and siloed analytical tools with limited collaboration capabilities. To enhance productivity and time to value, we will work together to co-create an open all-in-one data, analytics, workflow and collaboration solution that will reimagine client experiences for the first time.
“This will be realized through the next generation of LSEG Workspace on Microsoft Teams platform that will support in-application rich experiences for understanding trends and analyzing risk and building scenarios while meeting strict security, privacy and compliance requirements.
“Additionally, with enhanced Excel integration, customers will be able to create financial models, run data analytics and visualizations using LSEG content delivered in Excel and work seamlessly between LSEG Workspace and Microsoft 365.”
Now, I’m certainly not an expert on financial markets nor on the daily functions of the people who work in that dynamic sector, so it’s certainly possible that I’m off-base in my contention above about how this new Teams solution could “disrupt how hundreds of thousands of financial-services professionals access and analyze data and collaborate.”
But look at these points made in the excerpt above about the impact this new Teams deployment could have:
- In the first few words of the excerpt, Microsoft describes the target market as the entire “financial-markets community,” and we’re talking about a global workforce. So, if anything, my portrayal of “hundreds of thousands” might well be an understatement.
- Microsoft and the London Stock Exchange are not looking at a narrow deployment of Teams’ capabilities—quite the opposite: “…we will work together to co-create an open all-in-one data, analytics, workflow and collaboration solution that will reimagine client experiences for the first time.” That’s a pretty dang ambitious vision!
- Called the “LSEG Workspace on Microsoft Teams,” the platform will “support in-application rich experiences for understanding trends and analyzing risk and building scenarios while meeting strict security, privacy and compliance requirements.” Again, that’s a very broad and challenging set of capabilities, particularly when the extremely tight requirements around security, privacy, and compliance are factored in.
- And, “customers will be able to create financial models and run data analytics and visualizations using LSEG content delivered in Excel” with seamless access across the new LSEG Workspace and the very well-entrenched Microsoft 365.
Final thought
Well, I guess if you’re going to do a 10-year deal worth $5 billion and also fork over $2 billion for a 4% ownership stake in your big new customer, you don’t want to play tiddlywinks with the various solutions involved. (The blog post to which I’ve linked in a couple of places above spells out all of the Microsoft cloud products and services rolled up in this huge deal.)
And Microsoft’s certainly not doing that. In fact, it looks to me like one of Microsoft’s major goals with this stock-exchange megadeal is to dramatically enhance the position of Teams as a world-class enterprise-strength platform. If they can pull that off, it will be a huge benefit for both customers and for the longtime #1 company on the Cloud Wars Top 10.
