Microsoft has responded with a fairly cheap price model of its own for Exchange and SharePoint. Exchange Online can be purchased for $10 per user per month while SharePoint Online will cost just $7.25 per user per month. By comparison, under its traditional deployment model, an Exchange server costs about $699, with standard licenses for each individual costing an additional $67 each. A SharePoint server starts at more than $4,000, and goes up from there.

Under the traditional model, the trouble for companies has not just been the cost of the software and hardware. They also must pay staff to maintain the servers and the updates the software requires, a process that can be costly when more pressing business matters need technology support, a fact Elop acknowledged.

"At scale, we can provide [messaging and collaboration software] far more cost effectively than IT organizations," he says. "So now the CIO can say, 'I can pay less money to take care of that' and redirect some of these resources towards something more strategic. That's something that's happening in the business today, particularly when times are tough."

According to Elop, Microsoft has been building out their data centers and adding servers to keep up with what they believe will be a boom in cloud computing during the next few years. Unlike Google, which guards its data center strategies very closely, Elop talked pretty openly about the company's data center efforts during his presentation.

"We're adding thousands of servers every month," he says.

The key for Microsoft will be to convince the thousands of businesses who have bought from the company in the past to stay with them as this new computing model emerges. Tom Grahek, director of technology delivery at Fair Isaac, the analytics company that developed the FICO credit scoring system, has already shifted 50 of his 2,700 employees to a pilot version of Exchange Online, with the intention of moving everyone in that direction.

According to Grahek, the fact Microsoft has so many data centers ensures that his data is backed up and more secure as a result, an aspect he says makes online services from Microsoft attractive.

"Security, encryption, archiving, business continuity — it's all comes with the subscription," he says. "Taking advantage of their scale is very important to us."

As Microsoft evolves, so does its partner community of third-party companies. This ecosystem is comprised of organizations who make their living installing Microsoft software at companies and consulting them on how to use it.