Everyone (and I mean everyone) on the Microsoft 365 team has been pursuing some very ambitious goals in the ten months since we launched Microsoft 365. Those goals have all been laser focused on one key thing: Helping our customers effectively navigate their own unique path towards the digital transformation that they need to succeed and thrive.

A big part of this effort has been setting a high bar for the quality and usability of the solutions that both IT and end users will work with every day.

After so much hard work, it was great to find out last week that Microsoft had been recognized as a 2018 Gartner Peer Insights Customers Choice for Client Management Tools.

We believe being recognized in this way by our customers is the most valuable type of feedback you can give a group of engineers. We know that millions of IT Professionals stake their careers on the quality and performance of the products and services we deliver, and we know that 100,000s of organizations need high quality user experiences in order for their employees to achieve more with these tools. The products we build have a huge impact on the success of people and organizations and that is why, for a company like ours that is so customer obsessed, this recognition from the IT Professionals who live daily in the products and services we build is incredibly meaningful.

In its announcement, Gartner explains, The Gartner Peer Insights Customers Choice is a recognition of vendors in this market by verified end-user professionals, taking into account both the number of reviews and the overall user ratings. Gartner also notes that, to ensure fair evaluation, they maintain a rigorous criteria for recognizing vendors with a high customer satisfaction rate.

Late last year we were celebrating the 25th anniversary of System Center Configuration Manager (I recommend you checkout our homemade and the user-made tributes) and, during that very important milestone, it was really exciting to see ConfigMgr evolve to embrace the cloud. As of today, there are over 115 million monthly active devices being managed by ConfigMgr and all of them can access these cloud-based services.

It has been really exciting to see the incredible work so many organizations are doing with our modern management services in the cloud. Right now, Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) has more than 73,000 customers, and we see an average of 1M new devices coming under management every month. There have even been times weve seen 2M new devices come under management in a single 30-day period! We have also seen 400% growth in the usage of Intune in the last 12 months. There are quite a few stats I can share, but I believe usage statistics matter most for one simple reason: These numbers show that IT Pros are so happy with both the user experience and the output of ConfigMgr and EMS that they have taken the time to call this out on Gartners website.

On behalf of everyone working on M365, I want to say THANK YOU to our customers for this recognition!

One final note: Because we are always looking ahead to what our customers and partners will need next, I want to highlight the fact that, with each release and update of ConfigMgr, we work to ensure that we are delivering the capabilities and enabling the scenarios that you will need to address new challenges and new opportunities. With each release we have pushed the architecture forward to stay relevant and modern. As we have pursued the whats next and moved the architecture ahead, many organizations and IT Pros have moved with us every step of the way. Currently, many of the capabilities we are pursuing include the move to the cloud that has been underway for years. The cloud is now an indispensable part of how you protect and enhance your organization with intelligent services and security.

Seeing this award cover both PC and device management emphasizes a reality IT Pros have been living with for years: PC and device management is converging, and, with ConfigMgr as the most commonly used PC management solution, it is a natural place for IT Pros to look when they begin consolidating their various management tools. The growing momentum and usage of Intune and EMS really emphasizes this, and Co-Management is the fastest and easiest way to do this.

If youd like to learn more about how to start using cloud services within your existing ConfigMgr deployment by turning on Co-Management with just 4 clicks and immediately getting features like Conditional Access (among many others!), visit https://aka.ms/Just4Clicks, or check out the video below.

Gartner Peer Insights Customers Choice distinctions are determined by the subjective opinions of individual end-user customers based on their own experiences, the number of published reviews on Gartner Peer Insights, and overall ratings for a given vendor in the market, as further described here, and are not intended in any way to represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates.