Microsoft Office 365Customer Solution Case Study

Moving to the cloud increases productivity for Russian IT provider

OverviewCountry or Region: RussiaIndustry: Professional services

Customer ProfileITC is part of a construction holding company that carries out the integration and implementation of IT projects for the constructions firm’s business groups.

Business SituationIn order to cut hardware and deployment costs, the management of Information Technology Company Ltd. decided to move from an on-premises system to the cloud.

SolutionMicrosoft Office 365 provided ITC with improved uptime, and centralized access to all company information.

Benefits Increased efficiency Decreased labor costs Lower IT overhead

We have construction sites located all over, and we chose Office 365 because Microsoft cloud technology enables us to remain mobile, and have access to information and files from almost anywhere.

Sergey Mikhaylov, Director, ITC

Information-Technology Company Ltd. (ITC) provides IT services for a construction holding company, carrying out the integration and implementation of IT projects. The holding company consists of two subsidiaries. One is IT system administration, which implements and manages IT infrastructure projects, and also manages organizations conducting software integration and development. The other, which includes the construction holding groups, covers the main phases of modern residential areas construction, from investment and construction through maintenance.

ITC’s entire focus—business-critical services, which the company maintains for its internal customers—is on data processing centers. This fact puts the business a lot of scrutiny, and sets high quality expectations for data support.

Situation

The company needed to optimize the existing centralized infrastructure in order to decrease maintenance and integration costs for the products used. Initially, ITC chose the strategy of consolidating infrastructure into a single platform, which gave a significant advantage during maintenance, and when integrating with other systems and upgrading to new technologies.  Placing all business applications and services into one data processing center leads to certain risks however. It also requires a fault-tolerant operation of services, which uses a considerable amount of IT resources. ITC chose instead to outsource with Microsoft Office 365, an online service which unites familiar Microsoft Office applications with email, calendaring, collaboration, and communication solutions. This strategy allowed the company to concentrate on solving business problems by reducing the resources needed for the maintenance, adjustment, and support of its services. "We have construction sites located all over, and we chose Office 365 because Microsoft cloud technology enables us to remain mobile, and have access to information and files from almost anywhere," says Sergey Mikhaylov, Director of ITC.

Solution

After a thorough selection of the candidates a choice of Softline as a partner company was made. In the course of the project, the local IT infrastructure of ITC and the Microsoft cloud were integrated. Microsoft Active Directory was

synchronized, and all user accounts were transferred, after which all users automatically received access to cloud email. Besides this, Microsoft SharePoint Online ensures joint operation with all users' documents, regardless of their location. “In our business, project teams are quite mobile and the geography of the projects is rather wide, all that requires the mobility of a user's workplace and its quick build-up,” says Mikhaylov. “Our goal is to create fast and effective access to IT services in any regional or national location. Meanwhile the major risk is the threat of fault-intolerance. The Office 365 service has a guaranteed uptime of 99.9% - which is less than 9 hours of service downtime per year. Providing such an indicator in our own DPC would be too costly.” Aleksey Butakov, Business Development Manager of Softline points out, “These days, people talk a lot about 'the cloud’, but when speaking of the benefits of cloud technology, only few conclusions are made. In fact ‘the cloud’ is a new business opportunity, which give our businesses universality, flexibility, and a chance to integrate not only with internal but with external services also. ‘The cloud’ allow us to change business development strategy. For this reason cloud technology is not just another IT instrument, but a strategic asset of the company. I'm extremely pleased that ITC became not only the first company in Russia to use Microsoft Office 365 cloud solutions for commercial purposes, and not only the first Softline client in the cloud solutions sphere of Microsoft Office 365, but also an organization that found the right approach to this technology—seeing

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‘the cloud’ as a strategic asset. I'm quite positive that a steady and sustained growth is awaiting the construction company, for support and development of which ITC was created, since they made the right investment!”

Benefits

After implementing Office 365, employee workstations consist only of a laptop connected to a 3-G modem plus a Windows Phone 7. All that is required to make a new employee operational now is to set up a user account and provide an Internet channel. After this all of the services - Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Lync Online communication tool are available to a new user after logging into the system through a browser. If there is no connection, the user can use the usual working tools with the help of Office 2010 Professional Plus, also included in Office 365 package, installed on a laptop. As the result of implementation, ITC significantly increased the efficiency of its business processes, reduced labor costs of the IT department used to maintain the

infrastructure of the company, as well as total costs of maintaining the PC stock and the cost of maintaining work stations due to the now-centralized management and updates. In addition extra hardware resources in the data processing center of ITC were made available, and the ITC

service team got more time to solve important business problems, which used to be spent on maintaining and updating the systems.  Future implementation plansIn the future, ITC is planning to continue developing its use of cloud technology, transferring its business processes to the cloud, cutting maintenance and system administration costs, and at the same time increasing quality. “We believe that with the active use of the Microsoft single platform and its cloud services, we can achieve outstanding results,” says Sergey Mikhaylov, concluding that, “Our migration to the cloud is not limited to Office 365 only. We would like to move not just our email services, portal, and communications, but also our business applications, including the ones we develop ourselves.” At the moment ITC is implementing a new project, moving the its integrated data bus to the cloud using Microsoft operating system Windows Azure, and all new software development projects are carried out only in the terms of implementing them as web services.

Microsoft Office 365Microsoft Office 365 brings together cloud versions of our most trusted communications and collaboration products—Microsoft SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online—with

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about Softline products and services, visit the website at: http://softline.ru/

For more information about ITC products and services, visit the website at: http://its-srv.ru/

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published July 2012

Software and ServicesMicrosoft Office 365 Microsoft SharePoint Online Microsoft Lync OnlineMicrosoft Active Directory

the latest version of our Office desktop suite and companion web applications for businesses of all sizes.

Office 365 helps save time and money, and it frees up valued resources. Simple to use and easy to administer, it is financially backed by a service level agreement guaranteeing 99 percent reliability. Office 365 features robust security, IT-level phone support, geo-redundancy, disaster recovery, and the business-class privacy controls and standards that you expect from a world-class service provider.

For more information about Microsoft Office 365, go to:www.office365.com

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