There is little doubt that Microsoft SharePoint is a tremendously successful product. But the extent of its success was put on full display by Jared Spataro, senior director of product management for SharePoint last week at the SharePoint Conference keynote address in Anaheim, Calif. As Spataro pointed out, SharePoint has been a smash hit for Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) breaking through the billion dollars in earnings a few years ago.

As we reported last year, SharePoint could be on its way to being Microsoft's first $2 billion business. At the time, I wrote: "If true, that's astonishing, especially when Gartner predicted as recently as 2007 that the entire enterprise content management space would reach $4.2 billion by the end of this year. In fact, in 2009, Gartner reportedly placed the value at just $3.3 billion, probably making that earlier prediction a bit optimistic unless it was combining ECM and WCM."

Put in any context, SharePoint is a truly amazing player in the content management space. In that spirit, let's look at some of the numbers that Spataro rattled off at the keynote:

• 125 million licenses;
• 65,000 customers; and
• 67 percent of customers reported rolling out SharePoint to the entire organization.

I'm willing to bet that even the largest players don't come anywhere near 65,000 customers, never mind 125,000 licenses. To say it is the dominant player today in content management and enterprise social would be a major understatement.

While all of these customers might not be taking full advantage of all the SharePoint functionality, and numbers can be sliced and diced to impress--it's impressive nonetheless.

The conference itself had 7,500 attendees with 200 partners on the conference floor. 

For more information:
- see the video of the SharePoint Conference keynote. (Note that it requires the Silverlight plug-in for viewing.)

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