For now, the Office product that Hyatt's Blake is most focused on is the cloud-hosted email and collaboration suite Office 365 and its predecessor, BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite). Hyatt is deploying BPOS and plans to later upgrade to Office 365, which was released in mid-2011 and includes online versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Office and Lync. Office 365 will be upgraded again once Office 15 is released in final form.

Coming from IBM Lotus Notes, Hyatt has experienced a significant improvement in email reliability and in employee collaboration from using BPOS.

Prior to rolling out BPOS, Hyatt's email system was down 81 times over three years, with each of those outages being 10 minutes long or more. In the 13 months since it has been using Exchange Online, Hyatt has had only three hours of downtime, he said.

Meanwhile, SharePoint Online has taken employees' ability to collaborate with each other and with customers and partners to another level, he said.

Blake, however, isn't too happy with the licensing scheme for BPOS and Office 365, which he finds too complicated, especially considering that they are subscription-based suites.